Ballmer: Biggest Launch Ever

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Microsoft announced the availability of Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 for businesses on Nov. 30, an event company CEO Steve Ballmer said was the “biggest launch we’ve ever done.”

After delivering a media address at the Nasdaq Stock Exchange in New York to celebrate the product availability, Ballmer sat down with eWEEK Senior Editor Peter Galli to talk about why he feels this is a new day for Microsoft, developers and its customers.

He also talked about the way software will be delivered in the future and how services enablement within Windows would play out. This is part one of that interview. To read part two, click here.

I have been talking to a lot of developers and customers, some of them skeptical, and they are asking how the release of these three key products and the associated 30 technologies brings a new day. To them it is more of the same: more products, greater cost and complexity for them to integrate, deploy and manage. What do you tell those people?

I would say a couple of things, particularly to the developers. Number one, we are actually making building powerful applications simply far easier. We have more machinery for developers to take advantage of.

I think we have done a good job on integration, so not only is there more machinery there, it is relatively simple for a developer to stitch together and really put in place a solution that can get people awfully excited.

At the end of the day, the biggest advance that ever happens in software development is more reusable pieces for people, and I think we are doing a very good job on that, whether it’s the presentation foundation, being able to use Office as a development platform, what we’ve done with Excel and SQL for business intelligence, search, etc.

On the flipside, for folks who are involved in IT and will think about deploying these things, on that dimension, which is one of the least glamorous aspects of the new end-user facing product, but if you look at what we’ve done with System Center Configuration Management, operation management, what we’ve done with the Forefront security technologies, both at the server and the client, what we’ve done in Vista itself around security, image management, USB technologies, I actually think we have taken huge strides forward to make it simpler.

Read the full story on eWeek: Ballmer: Biggest Launch Ever

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