Steve Ballmer at Bellevue Chamber of Commerce Dinner
Steve Ballmer is giving the keynote tonight at the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce meeting, and it is very cool to watch Steve Ballmer pace the stage like a panther. He really does own the room when he speaks, and is well worth watching if you ever get the chance.
Steve Ballmer has some very interesting ideas about where technology is going to go. He is relating to the idea that the pace of technology has to slow down. But odds are highly likely that it will not, because there is still so much to do that has not been done yet. We are in many ways an industry in its infancy. Computers do not really do that much in relationship to what people do, how they communicate, and how they accomplish tasks either cooperatively or individually. Computers are just now starting to work cooperatively in a meaningful way.
What will the next ten years bring, will we look back with nostalgia as we remember what a 4.7MZH processor is like? Will we laugh at the primitive ways of keyboard and mouse as the only way to access a compute? The access and ability to connect and talk to people like never before. Good for everyone, the real question is where do things go from here, what are the next five years going to look like or the next 10 years going to look like. The assumption is that the technology industry has to slow down, how can that be 10 years of vibrant innovation that has propelled the industry so far? With the advances that the computer industry has made in the last 10 years, think about all the things that still need to be done.
Computers have to learn about you, and how things about you work, can you handle my trip to California? WOuldn’t it be great if the computer could do that. THe computer has to be able to do that, speak the language of human beings and be interactive with speech typing, modalities of interaction that are not happening now, 10 years from now the world is all digital.
Every speaker (previously during dinner) has walked up here with paper, but no one walked up here with a computer. But what if you could and were connected to the resources of the people. Everything that can be digital will be, content, information, data, access. The projection out from what we do today, to where can all these move to be digital tomorrow. The truth of the matter is that technology is part of the solution, but how do we have a virtual meeting that is as effective as a personal meeting? Those are the things that we need to be able to do. Technology needs to go there and own that space to make communication truly viable on the internet.
Very rich formats like a person to person meeting.
What if every surface was an electronic white board? That is the kind of world that we need to be building, and the things that Microsoft wants to go there. Reading a large flow chart on the screen is hard, jammed numbers in spread sheets with large screens to present data. The user interface/actions and how we can improve the use of data in relationship to what we are doing at the time.
We still have the same old issues with computers, and how many times have we all heard “I Can’t find what I am looking for or I can’t analyze things the way that I want to”. The same basic story of what can be done and what can not be done. The idea is that we can not prove our hypothesis because we do not have access to the data that we need to analyze the data. This evokes the idea of BI business intelligence in relationship to the decisions and the actions that we take every day. It is the imagination and creativity of people who create software to answer these kinds of questions.
Microsoft is trying to be the company to build and commercialize things around software than anyone else in the world. The idea is not about the verticals, it is about the software creation and commercialization. Make and commercialize the most popular software so that people can do the things that they want to do using the tools and platforms provided by Microsoft, and indeed sometimes other platforms as well.
Education needs to improve, all the schools doing things that Microsoft needs, engineers, phd’s and invest in the educational system in this state. All employers need a more educated work force. Invest in all of the things that grow the area. There has to be more businesses being involved locally, and we need to attract the best and brightest then there is no way that we can stop innovation. This is the one key thing to solving the problems that we face as a community and as an industrial base, we have to improve those things that we have to improve.
NOTE: I am a little late in reporting this, this is from a speech last week at the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce Dinner where Steve Ballmer was the key note speaker.
tags: microsoft, ballmer, steve, steve ballmer, innovation, future, technology, education
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