Ballmer: Microsoft pushing for simplicity
The company’s goal is to provide users with software that has ‘click-to-run characteristics’ inside their firewalls, Ballmer said during a question-and-answer session with Gartner analysts at the consulting firm’s Symposium/ITxpo 2006 conference.
Ballmer discounts the competitive threat posed by software delivered over the Internet free of charge by vendors such as Google. "Most people, for the foreseeable future, are still going to want to run enterprise IT as enterprise IT," he says.
Nonetheless, Microsoft is developing its own online offerings, such as Windows Live and Office Live. Greg Barkee, director of technology at Providence Health System, says that it will be interesting to see where Microsoft and rival vendors take the concept of Internet-based applications.
"We are still pretty fat-client-centric," Barkee says. "Any time you can improve speed [and] efficiencies, it is a good thing, especially in the enterprise. [But] from what we continue to see, Microsoft’s products seem to get bigger, fatter, [with] larger disk space and larger memory requirements."
While Ballmer talked about improving applications, one conference attendee says that what Microsoft needs is improved software licensing.
"It needs to get better on licensing," says S-E. Haugen, vice-president of IT at Strohl Systems Group. "You cannot address licensing in a short session, and it is definitely nothing [Ballmer] wants to talk about, because it is a sore point."
Haugen says that Microsoft’s products are ‘sold in so many flavours and fashions’ that it is hard to keep track of them. For instance, he says that he has been unable to get consistent answers from resellers about licence fees, such as the cost of licensing the SQL Server database to run on a Windows server with four processors.
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