I just finished watching the Steve Ballmer keynote speech at Gartners ITxpo and I I have to give the two analysts that interviewed him credit.  With such a large, confident and conflict comfortable personality like Steve Ballmer, many people would throw soft balls.  In contrast, David Mitchell Smith and specifically Neil MacDonald, asked hard questions and more importantly hard follow-up questions. 

The initial questions focused primarily  on the well publicized challenges with compatibility that has lead to consumers and businesses not adopting Vista, for which Ballmer stated that Vista has been the most successful launch of an operating system that Microsoft has ever had.  Admitting that there were some hiccups with the launch, Ballmer also suggested that with any major OS launch there would challenges with compatibility based on legacy hardware and consumer learning curves.  When asked why a person should move to Vista as opposed to wait for W7, Ballmer suggested that each person or organization would have to make that decision themselves, but that he felt that Vista is the best OS currently out there.

The questions then moved to whether MS was concerned with Google’s office replacement, for which he scoffed and suggested that the Google solution was hardly a viable replacement to MSOffice  As well, he pointed to ComScores that show adoption of Google Docs plateauing over the last 7 months (it is in fact flat).  He also pointed out (quite humourously) Google Docs is still quite primitive in its functionality (I’m paraphrasing here: you can’t even put a freaking footnote in Google Docs).  He suggested that he has stronger competition from companies like OpenOffice and Star (now owned by Sun).

When the topic of conversation turned to Windows 7, there were a number of questions regarding why W7 should be viewed as a major OS launch as opposed to just a large revision (R2 as Neil put it).  Ballmer quite simply chalked it up to the size and scope of the work involved (2.5 years) and the level of new and improved functionality that W7 will provide users.

There was also a quick mention of Microsoft’s upcoming Cloud offering (Strata?), that will be officially announced in 2 weeks at the developers conference.

Overall, Steve Ballmer was quite humourous, completely candid and very entertaining (as you would expect).  I wish we had more time with him. 

Congratulations Gartner, your ITxpo was very well run.  From the ever present and helpful Gartner staff, to the venue, to the session quality and quantity, ITxpo 2008 was an absolute class act.  Thank you for your hospitality.