Steve Balmer - Live Blogging @ Web 2.0 Summit
The day started off with Steve Balmer. Steve gave a general talk on what Microsoft was doing well and what they needed to do better. Then Steve professed his loves for “Developers” without the dance.
There was a lot of talk about the partnership between Microsoft and Facebook, mostly on the ad platform. Steve then brought out Dan Fernandez to do a demo of Silverlight. As of today, Dan let everyone know, as of today Popfly is officially in open beta. He went through a demo of popfly, It seems like it will be a popular app for all the people on MySpace and Facebook. Seems that most of the apps in Popfly are pretty basic. You may be able to easily build these apps, but it runs Silverlight which most people don’t even know about.
Steve was asked about online office competition such as Google Docs and Zimbra. Steve then talked about how there are a lot of good competitors, but none of them do what MS Office does. I agree. Office is very powerful tool, though a little bloated.
When asked about Search, Steve went into a funny rant about it’s like little Johnny who is only 3, is being forced to play Basketball against the 12 year olds. But one day Little Johnny will grow up and Dunk on the older kids. Though he was talking about search, John (the host) stated “I think your talking about the Zune”. The crowd erupted in laughter. Steve Balmer is definitely fun to watch.
When asked about the purchase of my company aQuantive. He mostly focused on Atlas and Drive PM and their ad network. He didn’t have much to say about AA|RF. He also talked about MS buying almost 50 more companies in the next 5 years. It will be interesting to see how things go.
Steve talked about the Advertising Platform. Currently ads are server on context. This is that the user is looking at now. He feels advertising will move into more of a behavior platform. What are the users tendencies and behavior patterns and deliver ads to them that way.
RSS Feeds