Comment: Ballmer's MIX08 keynote strikes a chord

Posted on 7 Mar 2008 at 11:34

I'm writing this just a few minutes after coming out from the theatre at the Venetian after watching the Steve Ballmer keynote, always an entertaining event.

Steve was on very good form as usual, putting forward Microsoft's vision for the future and fielding the odd awkward question. His view that any company that doesn't constantly improve will become less relevant is one that certainly strikes a chord.

Read Mark's take on Silverlight 2 at MIX08 here

More telling was Steve's statement that Microsoft is still a small player on the web. This is a position that he certainly is working on, as the rest of his keynote demonstrated.

One announcement he hinted on was that Microsoft will be offering computing on the 'cloud' where you'll be able to rent processing power on an hourly basis.

The question of the proposed buy-out of Yahoo (and why?!) was obviously raised and Steve's answer was an interesting insight to Microsoft's view on the future of doing business on the web; he said, "Advertising on the net is the next big thing and search is the killer application for advertising".

The advertising industry is worth billions a year and I'm sure we'll be seeing some big changes as the major players jostle for market share.

Oh, and I asked about accessibility to the Head of Development, Brad Becker. He assured me that Silverlight has extensive accessibility capabilities built in; he'll be sending me the full specification later.

It's starting to look like Microsoft has indeed got all bases covered with Silverlight.