Of course, Ballmer spent most of his time ballyhooing Vista and Office 2007 as the company’s biggest launches yet, during a media event at the Nasdaq headquarters in New York.
Each of these products breaks new ground, he said. It’s the most significant release in terms of the depth and breadth of functionality.
But he also outlined several of the more than 30 forthcoming business products slated for next year.
They include Office 2007 and Exchange 2007, Windows Desktop Optimization Pack, Forefront Client Security and PerformancePoint Server 2007. Also, new data-mining add-ons for Office will become available, Ballmer said.
And with great gusto, he talked about the forthcoming voice call management in the Office Communication Server 2007, which is an on-premise audio/video and Web conferencing, software-based IP product.
It should be noted, however, that Microsoft is counting each Office 2007 client and server product separately as part of its 30. That includes Excel 2007 and Word 2007.
Ballmer also touted new hardware products for businesses, such as its upcoming Roundtable video-conferencing camera.
Still, he also promised compelling future versions of Windows that would be designed to better optimize multicore chips, and would include new, unspecified networking technologies. We will continue to do exciting new releases, Ballmer said. There’s a lot more that we didn’t get to that we would have loved to do from an end-user perspective, he said.
The amount of new hardware innovation that needs to be supported is really quite dramatic. He pointed to improvements in networking and semiconductor hardware that requires better software support. Microsoft has a ways to go to make these new technologies simpler to deploy, simpler to manage for the IT manager, Ballmer said.
Still, there was no upgrade for Windows Mobile yesterday. Ballmer said Microsoft would upgrade Mobile roughly once a year. He said upgrades first needed to be certified at wireless operators before release. We just recently finished a release, but you won’t see the results in market for a little bit longer period of time … not longer than a year, he said.
In the meantime, Microsoft will be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing Vista, according to Ballmer. He said the marketing spend for Vista would go beyond than that for XP and would be the largest yet in Microsoft’s history.
