Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said his company may be the only one with a chance to rival Google in search over the long term, but acknowledged that it will take several more years and a whole lot of money.
"It's going to take us a while," he said, during a speech at the Churchill Club in Santa Clara, California. "We've got a lot to do."
Venture capitalist Ann Winblad, who was moderating the talk with Ballmer, noted that when Ballmer addressed the club in 2006, he said search was a five-year battle.
"It's a five-year task," he said, with a smile. "It's a long-term task."
To succeed, he said, the company will have to find a way to fundamentally change the experience and the economics of search. "You have to redefine the category," Ballmer said. "We've taken some steps in that direction."
"You don't really brute force your way into any market," he said.
On the antitrust front, Winblad asked Ballmer if he had any advice for Google's executives. "I'd probably keep that advice to myself," he said.
He also stayed silent on several other topics, such as a question about 'Red Dog', the company's rumoured competitor to Amazon's EC2. He did promise Microsoft would have much more to say in six weeks at the company's Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles.
Ballmer did say that Red Dog and other cloud-computing efforts are key to winning the battle for developers, particularly web developers.
"I think at the end of the day, cloud computing will be dictated by the interests and the degree to which you capture the imagination of developers," Ballmer said.
Ballmer also gave his views on other topics, including the Seinfeld-Gates ads: "It was a two-week campaign but man did it get people talking for more than two weeks," he said.
On the phone business, Ballmer said that in five to ten years, all billion mobile phones sold a year will be smartphones. He said that means software and hardware are likely to separate, at least in the mass market. Of the players in that area — Windows Mobile, Symbian, Linux mobile and Android — he claimed Microsoft's was the most mature.
Ballnmer said RIM and Apple may have profitable businesses, but they are likely to be niches. "We're kind of battling for the big part," Ballmer said. "That doesn't mean Apple and RIM won't make lots of money."
On Windows-related headaches, Ballmer said: "Every version of Windows statistically... gets better than versions before," he said. "I'm not saying that we are there yet."
With Vista, he said Microsoft made a choice, right or wrong, to change some things that caused compatibility issues in the name of security.
Ballmer claimed it would be easier if Microsoft was trying to build a fixed-function device rather than an open, general-purpose platform. Still, he said, the goal is a system that everyone likes. "Every day we've got 5,000 people... that come to work just focused on that single challenge."
