Steve Ballmer: Microsoft will never be like IBM

Minneapolis (MN) - Microsoft presented itself much more confident at its World Wide Partner Conference 2005 than in previous years. After years of legal struggles, Microsoft’s marketing and sales machine expands in several new markets : CEO Steve Ballmer rallied about 6000 attendees to take aim at IBM and Novell.

Microsoft just wrapped up the most conference for the firm’s partners, giving participants a taste of its near-term strategy. Especially Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, used the event to show partner companies not just new products but strategies to capture new markets as well.

A key aspect in Ballmer’s speech was the ongoing battle with IBM. According to the executive, Microsoft does not intend to compete for services contracts with end customers. While companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, or Novell consider services as a key growth opportunity, Ballmer said that is consultants act as contacts for large customers, but not as source that will implement technology solutions. Instead, partners would be much more suited to do this job : "People say, IBM has the biggest services army in the world," Ballmer said. "I say that is nonsense. Look around. Our partner base is the biggest services force in the world."

Ballmer indicated that IBM’s strategy do play everything for everyone does not pay off. He questioned hardware, software and services quality : " IBM’s product line is the weakest it’s ever been," Ballmer said.

New products at the conference included SQL-Server 2005, .Net 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, BizTalk 2006 und MBS Axapta 4.0 as well as Navision 4.0 SP1. Numerous presentations mentioned the upcoming new Office suite which promises to improve especially collaboration capabilities : Especially corporate users will be able to use SharePoint Portal Server to find new and more efficient ways how to find and organize information. Designed as a company wide portal, information will not be stored in folders anymore, but instant searches will provide information related to current documents automatically. For example, a project manager will have immediate access to all relevent project information without spending time on searching and organizing data and applications.

Joe Lorenz is president of ITIS AG. He can be reached at jlorenz@itis.de.