Ballmer: Windows 7 Will Save £100 A Year

Pushing Microsoft in education

Microsoft will be pushing as ever, to get its products into schools, and Ballmer promised “our most aggressive pricing” for acadmeic institutions .

“Windows 7 will be our flagship in schools,” said Ballmer, He also suggested that the government should consider investing in modernising school IT: “It’s an obvious and easy place to thinnk about spending government stimulus money.”

“Schools are funny places, because they are more cost-sensitive than any other part of the market, and yet they are trying to prepare students to use technology as they would in the real world,” he said.

Cloud visions

“There is no question that the cloud is growing to become a fundamental part of the computing fabric for everyone,” said Ballmer, adding that “everything that is on-premise today will be considered for the cloud.”

Yet the end game will involve a range of things from public clouds to private clouds and client computing, with future data centres “looking like shipping containers”.

And in all cases, there will be storage and computing on the client: “No-one believes in thin clients,” he said. “Everyone believes in the need for local storage and local computation.”

Google likes thick clients, he said, chiding the search giant for having two separate rich clients – Android and the proposed Chrome OS. And he described Firefox as a thick client also.

“The world demands rich clients,” said Ballmer, claiming that “the Internet was designed for the PC,” or devices like it with a large screen size.

Although the iPhone has a good browser, users don’t use apps there: “People don’t like the browser. That’s why there is an App Store,” he said.

A lot of the new features in applications software are designed for the demands of the cloud, he said, pointing to the re-architecting of Exchange Server 2010’s storage.

“We’ve redesigned the storage infrastructure to dramatically reduce the cost of storing all that data,” he said – and that was not just done for customers: “Frankly there is no way for us to to run a cloud service unless we could dramatically reducing the storage cost that unerpin that,” he said.

Finally… compliance

Compliance is an issue for Microsoft, just as much as for the cloud, he said, and Microsoft has very good reasons for improving the archiving in Exchange Server. .

“Maybe I’m more expert in this in certain ways, than I’d wish,” said Ballmer, adding that producing documents in a form required by regulations had become “a mission critical activity around Microsoft”.