Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft, is
taking a realistic view of security, Microsoft's product road map,
the challenge of Linux and the future of IT. Mike Simons met
him.
With Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing security
initiative approaching its third birthday, Ballmer said, "We will
be working on Trustworthy Computing for the rest of my days at
Microsoft. There are 'bad people' out there and they are not going
to go away."
Security was "job number one" at Microsoft, said Ballmer, who
added that despite the general impression, IT security was
improving. More damage was done by virus attacks in the past than
today, said the Microsoft CEO, who added that in the next two to
three years the technology and user application of technology would
improve security significantly.
He spoke about the development of "isolation technology" to
ensure that laptops and mobile devices did not introduce viruses
and malware to corporate systems. The technology is in use within
Microsoft itself and will be available in Longhorn, the next
generation of Windows, if not before.
As IT directors continue to battle to make the business case for
IT spending, Ballmer said he was looking forward to a period of
steady growth in IT spending after the "New Year's eve binge" of
Y2K and the internet bubble. "We have had a two-and-a-half year
drying-out period and now [IT spending] is at a stable place," he
said.
In recent weeks Microsoft has been running an aggressive
advertising campaign against Linux and open source software. "We
are making a concerted effort to make sure the facts are
communicated," said a bullish Ballmer.
He described Linux as a major threat to Microsoft since it was
targeting Windows, the company's most profitable product but said
Microsoft was winning the arguments about total cost of ownership
of open source products.
The Microsoft CEO shrugged off questions about delays and
changes in specification in Longhorn. He said that if the company
had not announced its plans, users would perceive Longhorn, when it
is launched in 2006, as the "biggest and best" version of Windows
yet.
Ballmer acknowledged Microsoft's attention to the consumer
market, but he dismissed suggestions that corporate users might
lose out as the company focused on consumer products.
The company's development teams did not accept a fundamental
division between consumer and corporate products, said Ballmer, who
claimed 90% of Microsoft's R&D resulted in common benefits to
both communities.
- An exclusive interview with Steve Ballmer on user
issues such as security, licensing and open source will be
published on 12 October in Computer Weekly and on
Computerweekly.com.