Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft,
kicked off his presentation to UK businesses and partners with
a message,
urging them to innovate with IT.
He said, "In a tough economic climate, now's the time to be more
innovative with IT."
For Microsoft, innovation means lowering the cost of doing IT,
making IT departments more efficient and offering cheaper
alternatives to rival applications and operating systems. He said
Windows 7, Exchange 2010 and Windows Server 2008 R2 would be the
products to help IT departments achieve their cost cutting
objectives.
He had VMWare in his sights, and urged users to deploy new
virtual machines with the Microsoft technology, rather than VMWare,
because it offered cheaper licensing.
Ballmer recognised the importance of cloud computing in giving
businesses an alternative, potentially lower cost, way to deploy IT
infrastructure. He predicted CIOs would buy pre-installed data
centres in shipping containers, effectively, "cloud computing in a
box," which they could use for internal cloud services. This is the
approach Microsoft has itself taken with its
recently opened Dublin data centre site.
Client operating systems like
Windows 7, will part of the company's DNA for at least the next 20
years. Ballmer said Microsoft was already working on Windows 8.
He said there was a lot of innovation occurring in client operating
systems, but voice, image and gesture recognition was still some
way off.
"Windows 7 will not be the last." Ballmer highlighted that the
main rivals to Microsoft were also busy developing operating
systems. For instance, he pointed out that the support for local
storage in the Firefox browser, makes it an operating system.
"Google has two operating systems with Chrome and Android."
In his presentation Ballmer used Apple as an example of why
users would not accept thin client devices that use a web browser
user interface. "Users on the iPhone would not tolerate web
applications. The iPhone has a browser but they use the AppStore
for applications."
Ballmer rules out Windows 7 licensing changes.
Ballmer spearheads Windows charm offensive
IT must innovate to beat recession says Ballmer.