Ballmer's bullish outlook

Q: Speaking of new areas of competition, people are interesting in what's happening with Microsoft Business Solutions. Given that Microsoft and SAP at one time explored a merger, does Microsoft's growth strategy for MBS depend on future acquisitions?

Ballmer: No, I wouldn't say it depends on acquisitions at all, not at this stage. That's not to say we won't do acquisitions -- I wouldn't rule it out. But I think with the base we have with Navision and Great Plains, I think we have what we need to drive strong organic growth. We have had to work hard to get things integrated, but we are poised for the kind of growth that we planned on when we did the acquisitions.

There were rumours that Microsoft explored a deal with Siebel Systems. Any interest in the company at this point?

Ballmer: It's not an issue in which we're engaged.

You made a comment this morning poking fun at a Microsoft product name. Do you think Microsoft is good at marketing?

Ballmer: Sometimes. Sometimes we're very good. Sometimes I get tired of hearing, oh, they're only good at marketing. The product was Windows Mobile Security and Messaging add-on pack, or something. Bleeeeeehhhh...Couldn't we have figured out a way to name that more simply?

Apple said today that it is going to use Intel's processors. What do you think the implications are for Microsoft, particularly on the desktop?

Ballmer: I'll answer the question with a question, and that's probably all I'll do today. And that is: what would change assuming this happens? What changes in the competitive dynamic between Microsoft and Apple? Will there be more device drivers because of this? No, Apple has their device model, we have ours. Will there be more hardware manufacturers that build Apple machines -- other than Apple? That's a whole business model change. No reason to believe so. Frankly, if people wanted to do that, they could have been buying parts from IBM.

What changes? There's more applications available for Windows than there are Apple. All a chip change could do is probably slow that down because maybe there'd be a big disruption with your ISV community. I don't know -- we haven't gone through a chip change in our world.

There's more training, knowledge, management on how to implement networks. What changes? What changes? I don't know. You ask yourself the question and you can ask the question in the changes in the competitive dynamic. Today there's probably an order of magnitude, probably 50 copies of Windows sold for every copy of Mac, maybe a little more than that, maybe a little less than that. Ask yourself is there something fundamental that changes with this shift? And I'll leave that to you to answer.