Ballmer's bullish outlook

For more than 20 years, Steve Ballmer has been Microsoft's chief salesman, promoting his company's products with a mixture of over-the-top enthusiasm, street-fighter brashness and market savvy.

He hasn't mellowed. During the course of a 30-minute meeting with editors from CNET News.com at the Tech Ed conference in Orlando, Ballmer was his vintage self, variously pounding on the table or bellowing answers to drive home sundry points. What has changed is how Microsoft's CEO and his sales troops deliver the message.

Instead of offering up a constant stream of speeds-and-feeds, product features and shipping dates, Ballmer now prefers to discuss how IT pros can save money or how they can use technology to make employees more productive.

That's a key shift. Microsoft's customers update their software less frequently than they did a few years ago. Meanwhile, they tend to be more concerned about controlling expenses and making better use of existing infrastructure.

Q. This morning, you talked about IT as a good profession and talked about industry enthusiasm returning to IT. Why did you feel you need to do that? Did you feel the need to rally the troops?

Ballmer: You guys like to write articles about how budgets are down, and outsourcing is going on, and blah, blah, blah. Somebody's got to stand up and say, the future's so bright you gotta wear shades! I'm being a bit casual about it, but there are plenty of places where you can read about how IT is at the end of its rope, budgets are being cut -- and there's plenty you can read about outsourcing. The truth of the matter is that if you are in IT in the US right now, that's a very good choice to make. I think we all know that fewer students are choosing to major in computer science...Well, who should be the No. 1 evangelists that these are good career choices? People in the business today.

If people in the field today don't feel good about their career choices, it's not a good thing for us, it's not a good thing for the industry, and in my opinion, it's not a good thing for future graduates. So you could say it sounds funny for me to be up there being a cheerleader...but it gives me the chance to say we have a lot of innovation coming.

Has IT spending picked up in recent months?

Ballmer: I think the industry has picked up amazingly. I'm a realist. Spending is (going to grow slowly), not (quickly)...It's like any other investment -- it's got costs and it's got benefits and the two have to justify each other. We went through a period where almost nothing really needed to be justified. And then we went through a period where, in my opinion, people were under-investing in new projects. And now we are back on a sane curve, where good investment with a good cost profile and a good return gets funded, and things that are silly don't get funded. What more can you ask for? You know, I don't think blanket optimism amongst the businesspeople and the user community is in the best interest of our industry either.