Microsoft’s vision: common platform for work and play: Ballmer offers new services, devices, insights

The Mad Ballmer remained out of sight for Tuesday’s keynote address before a standing-room-only crowd.
Instead, a calm, determined Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Corp.’s CEO, offered a new, enterprise-friendly, mobile-device-management suite, touched device maker HTC Corp. with his magic wand and just said no to spectrum ownership.
Questions about his competitors, which have produced invective in the past, did not draw out his more animated side. Say what you want about Microsoft, Ballmer appeared to be personally popular for his provocative thinking on computing.
Ballmer used the six-year span between his last keynote address at a CTIA I.T. show and now to articulate the wireless industry’s enviable trajectory. Then, his company had one device at one operator in one country, he said. Today, Windows Mobile runs on 140 phones with 160 operators in 55 countries.
Ballmer said that Microsoft could address both the enterprise and consumer mobility markets and would succeed, regardless of the needed effort.
“We’re very persistent,” Ballmer told the packed house at the Moscone Center. “We keep working. You can count on us to continue to stay on it.”
The remark-as well as several effective demos of Microsoft’s System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008-drew enthusiastic applause. The new product is designed to address the enterprise’s need to swiftly and simply deploy, manage and service handsets for data and voice.
“The mobile phone has a unique role,” Ballmer said. “It will become a universal remote control for your business life and personal life. Consumers want a phone that spans their many lives.”
Though Ballmer cited many partners in Microsoft’s quest to deliver on its vision of a mobile lifestyle, he emphasized HTC’s Touch device. The Touch and its intuitive user interface may well bring Sprint Nextel renewed luster and, possibly, new subscribers.
The Touch, which runs Windows Mobile 6, is a worthy competitor to Apple Inc.’s iPhone, is significantly cheaper and was in development long before the iPhone was announced. Perhaps ironically, the HTC team-including lead Touch innovator John Wang-sat quietly in the audience.
Understandably, devices are but a piece of the puzzle Microsoft has to address. Ballmer said Microsoft would pursue a “new model in computing” that required a common platform to support software for PCs, enterprise, online software and mobile devices.
Solving that challenge would be the top priority on Microsoft’s agenda.
“People shouldn’t have to pick,” Ballmer said. That was “yesterday’s idea.”
Earlier, he had acknowledged that “user expectations have been transformed.” It was “incredibly odd” to see people still tethered to multiple devices and Microsoft’s goal will be to provision partners’ devices with a single underlying technology platform that can be delivered in a variety of form factors, styles and functions.
That was the setup for Ballmer’s delivery of the mobile device manager news. He also announced the emergence of a startup, Enterprise Mobile, run by entrepreneur Mort Rosenthal, which would offer mobility planning, deployment and servicing to support Microsoft’s initiative.
Ballmer said mobilizing the enterprise is engendering “a small clash” between I.T. departments and corporate end users, but that could be resolved with the simplicity of Microsoft’s new product suite. If so, that suite-which is due next year-cannot come too soon. The day before, in a roundtable on enterprise mobility, Tim Oligmueller of Adidas Group, said that his sales-force automation effort required that he cut his I.T. department completely out of the action due to hostility to the idea.
Ballmer concluded that there was “never a better time” to be in the mobile industry, despite the 1 billion devices being sold each year. He intoned the perennial, optimistic mantra of keynote speakers before him when he extolled the industry’s “opportunity for all” and paid respect to network operators, device makers and other participants in the ecosystem.
The session ended with CTIA’s President and CEO Steve Largent querying Ballmer on spectrum, competitors and mobile advertising.
Ballmer said Microsoft would pursue core competencies with partners instead of pursuing spectrum, while acknowledging that Microsoft’s recent acquisitions reflected its interest in mobile advertising, where the revenue-sharing model posed “the first great problem for the industry.”
Finally, the Microsoft executive showed a quickly restrained flash of animation as he addressed competitors such as Apple and Google, which have famously raised his ire in past addresses.
Unlike competitors’s “closed systems,” his company is simply trying to enable third parties, Ballmer said, without firing off any salvos.
The audience applause appeared genuinely warm. The audience seemed pleased to have one of the world’s top computing thinkers in the house and encouraged that Microsoft was, in Ballmer’s words, “working, working, working” on solutions to mutual challenges.