As PC users clamor for Microsoft to continue to support Windows XP, company
CEO Steve Ballmer called the Vista OS "a work in progress" at an annual
Seattle event on Thursday.

"It's a very important piece of work. We did a lot of things right and
have a lot of things we need to learn from. You never want to let five years
go between releases," he said.

While Microsoft recently extended the date when the XP software will be available
for low-cost PCs, it doesn't plan to listen to some other complaints, including
that Vista is too big. "Vista is bigger than XP and it's gonna stay bigger
than XP," Ballmer said. "We have to make sure it doesn't get bigger
still."

During the lively session, peppered with flag waving by a rowdy group of Canadians,
hoots and applause, Ballmer spoke about a few other key areas that the company
will focused on in the near future. "It's virtualization time for Microsoft,"
he said. "We're gonna make sure we democratize virtualization." Probably
less than 5 percent of servers in the world are virtualized today, he said.
"It's too darn expensive and too hard to manage. We intend to take major
strides around addressing both of those."

He also said to expect more work from Microsoft in the search market. "There's
an opportunity to knock the socks off in terms of innovation," he said.

Once Microsoft introduces some blog services later this year, Ballmer intends
to ask its MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) to switch their default searches
to Live Search for one week. After that week, he'll ask for their feedback about
what they liked and what they didn't, as part of a broad effort to improve Microsoft's
third-place standing in the search market.

Another key area for the future of Microsoft is services. Overall, the use
of hosted services worldwide is small, but Ballmer expects that in two to three
years there will be an inflection point after which millions of people will
use hosted services, he said.

There are 4,000 Microsoft MVPs around the world, and nearly 1,800 of them gathered
in Seattle this week for an annual summit. MVPs are technology experts who provide
feedback to Microsoft about its products -- Ballmer said they are his favorite
group to address.

The topics Ballmer tackled during his talk were sometimes similar, but much
broader compared to the big issue that he, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft's
founders, discussed while beginning to develop software at Harvard University.
"Our strategy and mission have expanded," Ballmer said. In the very
beginning, year after year, Allen would approach Gates with the idea to start
building computers. And each time Gates sagely said, 'No, Paul, we're not hardware
guys,'" Ballmer said. "We're on that same strategy 30 years later
... but we do have an expansive vision."

IDG News Service

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