I am in New Orleans at the Microsoft World Partner Conference 2009 #WPC09 and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO gave his presentation this morning. Mr. Ballmer was very energetic as always and appeared very excited about Bing and the launch of so many products: Windows 7, IE 8, Silverlight 3.0, Office 2010, Windows 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows Mobile 6.5.
Mr. Ballmer talked about the leaps in technology we are seeing and how Microsoft is on the edge of technology that can understand human language meaning and not just keyword search. He also mentioned the new visual recognition technology developed in the gaming group.
Mr. Ballmer talked about the difficult economy but encouraged everyone to power through this economy and think long term. He said “We can’t fix the economy, but we can innovate and help customers.” He went on to explain that Microsoft will invest 9.5 Billion dollars in R&D in these 8 areas: Windows and IE, Windows Mobile, Communications, Server, Enterprise Infrastructure, Search, Entertainment, and ERP. Mr. Ballmer said “long term, long term, long term! Is Microsoft going to go home? We don’t go home!”