Ballmer: “Still a long way to go with Windows 8, and cloud services”

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer made the final keynote at Redmond’s Build conference in Anaheim, California yesterday, admitting to delegates that Microsoft still “had a long way to go with Windows 8”, but adding he was pleased about the 500,000 downloads of the Windows 8 Developer Preview.

“We’ve still got a lot of work to do on the ARM systems, which are very, very important to us,” said Ballmer, adding, “It’s not gonna be Intel or ARM, it’s gonna be Intel and ARM, for various usage scenarios."

Ballmer described Windows 8 as "Windows re-imagined", and said the company was in the process of re-imaging itself around four big themes.

“New hardware form factors, cloud services, new application scenarios, and new forms of software development is shifting our direction and what we’re trying to accomplish,” explained Ballmer.

At a presentation given at the University of Washington's Computer Science and Engineering Department 18 months ago entitled "The Cloud: Exciting New Possibilities", Ballmer said he was, “betting the company on the Azure cloud platform”.

In his Build keynote, Ballmer admitted that it was still very early days for firms shifting to cloud services.

“The speed with which people really think that apps will move to be these continuous services that can deliver to connected devices [through browser or as desktop apps], we’re still in the early days of this phenomenon,” he said.

“Even at Microsoft with our own applications, we’re 100 per cent committed to this way of doing things, and yet we feel we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface.”

Referring to the different business units of Microsoft – Windows, Phone, Xbox, Azure, Office, Bing and Dynamics – he said “each of these groups is redesigning their systems around Windows Server 8, and they’re moving to the cloud as their fundamental business model”.