The future for Microsoft: behind Ballmer's Build bluster

Steve Ballmer's keynote at Build 2013 was a third-party sales tour de force, but it left a few loose ends dangling on the hardware front

Like an oversized, sugar-rushing child rampaging through a branch of Carphone Warehouse, Ballmer’s salesman dial was turned up to 11 at the Build 2013 developers’ conference in San Francisco recently. Manhandling a series of Nokia, Lenovo and HP Windows 8 devices, crying out phrases such as “incredibly, incredibly beautiful”, Ballmer’s message was clear: third parties should make the hardware, and Windows will bring the software. But in future, that software will arrive much, much faster.

Ballmer explained the decision to hold this year’s Build only about seven months after the last as being a result of “the rapid pace of innovation, and the rapid pace we as a company are going through to move to an absolutely rapid release cycle”, before breaking into his customary impression of a verbal machine gun and spraying the audience with the words “rapid release, rapid release” ad nauseam.

Ballmer spoke of a Microsoft transforming from “a software company” to one that is “building software-powered devices and software-powered services”.

Super-powerful hybrid notebooks, said Ballmer, were central to Microsoft’s plans, with the company gearing up for an “outpouring of new devices that are notebook computers in every aspect, but have touch interfaces full integrated”.

Users are, according to Ballmer, clamouring for such systems “One of the things we’ve certainly seen in user research is customers who have Windows 8 touch systems are much happier than other customers, and are in fact much happier than Windows 7 customers,” said Ballmer.

“How many of us have gone to a meeting with someone who’s brought a tablet, and then when it comes time to actually take notes, they write them down with pencil and paper?” he asked.

“Or can’t get at a spreadsheet that they really need to do their work? Or take half an hour to set it up, and turn the tablet back into something that approximates a PC,” he added, pressing the point home

“And so really getting the ecosystem to comply with a product line of touch PCs is incredibly important,” Ballmer said.

This just had to be the build-up to a Surface 2 announcement, but as everybody held their collective breath for the much-expected Haswell chip-powered hybrid (a handful of developers had spoken off the record to Computing earlier about the device as if it was a reality) Ballmer just carried on working his way through the assembled line-up of third-party devices.

The Microsoft CEO went on to hail the “transformation and innovation in the fundamental hardware we think of as the Windows device”.

“We’ve seen an explosion in the range of innovative new devices that are being designed with Windows inside,” he said.

Ballmer went gooey-eyed over Acer’s new 8-inch Windows 8 tablet, the Iconia W3, which he said “partners have had to do real work on” in terms of miniaturising the hardware.

The mood in the auditorium, which at this stage had become rather muted, was lifted when Ballmer revealed that everybody present would be walking away with their own W3. However, there was no getting away from the fact this was a curious choice of hardware to promote when the market for small, student-level Windows devices was always supposed to be the domain of the ARM-based Windows RT, and more specifically by the Microsoft-built Surface RT.

Nevertheless, Ballmer insisted that the W3, which Computing recently awarded two stars out of five, is “literally flying off the shelves in terms of volume and appreciation”, and that “this small tablet form factor is very important, and we’re going to see a proliferation over the course of the next several months”. Again, with Haswell on the horizon, announcing a “Surface Mini” or similar device could have brought the house down. An RT-based, pocket-sized, Microsoft-branded machine to rival the Nexus 7 may have been just the ticket to restore Windows RT’s flagging reputation.

But no dice. Yet all of Computing’s attempts to grill Microsoft over the future of RT were met with unerringly positive noises. Developer and platform evangelist Tim O’Brien said Microsoft is “as committed to RT as we ever were”.

Before Build, the company’s UK strategic education partner lead, Mark Stewart, used the IT education conference TechEd to promote Surface RT as a “great device in the primary education” space. Stewart’s pitch, coupled with the fact that Microsoft is now selling the tablet to schools for $199, suggests this machine, which was once positioned as an iPad-beater, is now destined to be the plaything of eight-year-olds.

The future for Microsoft: behind Ballmer's Build bluster

Steve Ballmer's keynote at Build 2013 was a third-party sales tour de force, but it left a few loose ends dangling on the hardware front

The Surface Pro, meanwhile, was omitted from Ballmer’s keynote entirely. Days later, it emerged that Microsoft is teaming up with enterprise resellers to try to push the Pro aggressively into businesses. Pop-up stores and word of mouth, the company has had to admit, just isn’t enough to shift units in the corporate space.

After the channel news broke, a Micro- soft enterprise partner who wished to remain anonymous said the Surface Pro’s poor battery life was a deal-breaker, likening it to “an electric car that only goes 10 miles and then you have to plug it in”.

“Four-hour battery life stifles productivity,” he said, adding that unless Microsoft “fixed the battery” the Pro wouldn’t stand a chance of being considered a contender.

Again, a Haswell-powered “Surface 2” could have fixed this problem.

Among the more notable announcements at Build were the rebranding of Microsoft’s search engine Bing as a development platform and an Azure refresh with an increased emphasis on cross-platform backend access. Meanwhile, users of integrated development environment Visual Studio were given a semi-promise (“We’re thinking more about it…”) from corporate VP of development, Sivaramakrishnan Somasegar, that they will one day no longer have to wait for annual updates and will instead get the kind of regular updates that open source rivals such as MonoDevelop are starting to offer.

Back to hardware, and Ballmer spoke of how the Windows device of today “doesn’t look a lot like the device of five years ago”, and that he wasn’t sure how even to talk about a specific Windows 8 device. While this could easily be seen as corporate bluster designed to underscore the admittedly vast range of devices now available, it could also reveal a key weakness: Microsoft actually cannot see the future of its own hardware right now.

The ongoing pratfalls surrounding the only other piece of high-profile Microsoft hardware revealed to the world of late – the Xbox One – tell us something about Microsoft’s hardware roadmap such as it is. Announcing a living room hub of movies, games, Azure cloud access and targeted, interactive advertising for all could have been a glimpse into the future, but was handled by a PR machine from which the wheels became detached the moment the words had left Microsoft president of interactive entertainment, Don Mattrick’s, mouth. After revealing that the console would have to check in to a server every 24 hours to be declared legal and that pre-owned software would be abolished by registering games per-machine, Mattrick’s only response to a livid public was “if you don’t like it, buy an Xbox 360”.

Just last week, it was announced Mattrick had left Microsoft for struggling gaming firm Zynga, with Ballmer himself stepping up to oversee Xbox One for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, the digital rights management decisions have all been reversed.

An iPad rival flogged off at a heavy discount to school children, an enterprise-level hybrid tablet given away to 6,000 people as a free gift, and the follow-up to one of the most successful games machines ever produced turned into an object of scorn: all this, and Microsoft standing aside to give Nokia, Lenovo and friends the limelight as Windows 8.1 greets the world.

Perhaps Build wasn’t Microsoft’s big play in hardware this year, but in many ways there would never have been a better time. As it stands, the company’s new position is as a software-only vendor enabling a range of loyal partners.

The only risk here, as the Windows 8 apps market claws its way to 100,000 apps, is whether it can push enough software to keep these hardware-makers on board for the long haul.

@PeterGothard