The world is only going to scroll up from here. Inaugurating Tech.Ed 2009 here on Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he had come to share his enthusiasm about the future of the IT industry and its role in turning around the global economy.
Ballmer told the crowd of over 2,000 geeks that innovation and product advancement will be instrumental in driving the global economy into the growth phase in the next few years. “Today, IT matters more than ever before,” he said.
IT had helped more than double productivity in the US over the last two decades, he said. With clients facing huge cost pressure, Microsoft plans to spend $9 billion and over 45,000 man-years to create new products and solutions that will help ‘do more with less’.
These offerings will cover communication and collaboration technologies, cloud computing, virtualisation and business intelligence software, among others. Among the products Microsoft plans to launch next year are upgraded Windows Mobile, the operating system for mobile phones, and new unified communications solutions.
On cloud computing, the technology that promises to help enterprises cut costs, Ballmer said that Windows Azure, its operating system hosted on virtual servers, forms the backbone of the company’s software-plus-services strategy.
“We need to tie Windows PC, mobile phones and TV technologies (Xbox) into our software-plus-services strategy,” he said. Speaking on the choice of India as the venue for Tech.Ed 2009, the CEO of the world’s largest software company said the country was an obvious choice, being home to the largest number of computer science students.
In fact, Hyderabad is Microsoft’s largest R&D centre outside Redmond with about 3,000 employees. SilverLight, Microsoft’s rich Internet application for streaming multimedia content, has been developed entirely out of the capital city of Andhra Pradesh
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