Ballmer's bullish outlook

Q: We're coming up on the 10th anniversary of Windows 95's launch. You said that event generated the most excitement of any Microsoft product launch. Can you recapture some of that excitement with Longhorn?

Ballmer: I think Longhorn is going to be the biggest release we have done since Windows 95. It's going to be a big thing, but I don't think we should have expectations that we will have people lined up at midnight to buy a copy, necessarily, despite the fact that Longhorn is a huge deal. I think it's bigger than anything else we've ever done -- except Win95.

In a sense, technically, it's much bigger than Windows 95. But with Windows 95, you kind of had an alignment of the sun, the moon and the stars, right? There was no Internet to speak of yet. All of the action was still on the client. Win95 was a merger of MS-DOS and Windows, which in itself was a big event. There was something in it for hardware makers, there was something in it for software makers. There was kind of an alignment of events that made the launch much bigger than the product itself -- things outside of Microsoft's control, things that we were the beneficiaries of. I'm not sure all of the stars will align for Longhorn, but it's a huge release and it will drive the consumer market.

So what is the buzz in the industry now? Is there something that Longhorn can ride?

Ballmer: I think it's still around the Internet and intelligence at the edge of the Internet. We'll certainly ride that -- and search and visualisation and finding things. Digital entertainment, finding things you are interested in, and processing at the edge of the Internet. Longhorn is squarely in the middle of those trends.

What about for business buyers? What's your pitch to those customers? Why should they buy Longhorn?

Ballmer: The dynamic is that the end user gets excited about it because they use it at home. And all business decision makers and IT people are end users. It's very rare when you find these organisations that don't have the latest releases. But all of their senior people would be without those releases at home.

It's sort of like a flywheel that you have to set in motion. You have to get the end users excited. The end users are excited by the new shell, the new visualisation capabilities, the new organisation and searching capabilities -- those should excite end users. The new user interface -- kind of sexy, kind of cool. The media enhancements should excite end users.

Then, the IT guys are the gatekeepers. Are they going to get excited or do they see a problem? Just look at what we have done for security and manageability. Those things are potentially exciting. Business decision makers want application compatibility. There's got to be something there for everybody. That's what sort of cranks the flywheel.

But getting that flywheel going means you're relying on that consumer pull-through?

Ballmer: If you look at Windows XP or any major Windows phenomenon, the first major step is to get all consumer PCs to come with that version of Windows, and I don't think Longhorn will be any different.