Steve Ballmer’s WPC 2011 keynote turned into a lengthy state of the state of Microsoft, as he expounded on products like Skype, Windows Azure and Bing and how they will affect enterprises, partners and competitors. Here are some of Big Steve’s most quotable fightin’ words.
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Bing
“Bing is probably the Microsoft product that partners spend the least time with, but I think that’ll change — we’re thinking about developing an architecture that will open up Bing to be more of a platform.”
“Market share for Bing in the U.S. grew to 14 percent this year, up 3 points. It’s a 30 percent growth in number of search queries. In the past year, we’ve integrated in all of the Yahoo traffic, which means we are serving 30 percent of search queries in U.S. We went from 10 percent to 30 in one year.”
Windows Server, Windows Azure and the public and private cloud
“It has been a big year for our private cloud with Windows Server and Hyper-V products and public cloud with Windows Azure … In the last year Windows Server has built market share. Seventy-six percent of servers sold this year were Windows Server, and there’s been equivalent progress with 40 percent of databases running on top of our SQL server database.”
“Having a strategy that spans from public and private is a unique strength for Microsoft. Competitors like VMware, Oracle, Google and Amazon have offers that have merit but in a limited way. We think what you want is to have the flexibility to mix and match the public and private environments.”
Microsoft Dynamics (CRM and ERP)
“This is the 10 year anniversary of entering business application space, and we’ve experienced 20 percent compound annual growth. Dynamics is now its own standalone division.”
“Recently the LA public schools move 70,000 users to Microsoft Dynamics CRM.”
“I’ve been asked: When does ERP in the cloud? Starting with Dynamics NAV early next year we will start putting ERP in the cloud.”
Xbox Kinect (as a possible business tool)
“We brought our Xbox Kinect sensor product to market this year for the entertainment world and yet the amount of interest from businesses and partners in using Kinect in commercial applications is really high.”
Windows 7 and Windows 8
“We’re selling lots of Windows. We saw 350 million new PCs sold in last year, which compares to other guys [that would be Apple] that are in the 20 million range. 350, last time I checked, is a lot more than 20.”
“We did a brief glimpse of Windows 8 at conferences a month or two ago. We made it clear that we are supporting ARM processor architectures in addition to Intel. Windows 8 will be a true reimagining of Windows PCs and the dawning of Windows slates.”
Windows Division CFO and Corporate VP Tami Reller later announced that all Windows 7 hardware will be compatible with Windows 8.
