Tech Will Change World, Ballmer Says

SAN DIEGO -- More change and innovation is coming to information technology in the next ten years than in the past decade, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer declares.

Although budget constraints and security challenges will continue to strain IT departments, upcoming change will affect society more than the advent of PCs, broadband, and cell phones have in recent years, Ballmer told an audience of IT developers and professionals at Microsoft's Tech Ed event here.

"I think the next ten years will bring more positive change and innovation than in the last ten years," Ballmer said. He listed natural language, artificial intelligence, improved search, mobility, and interoperability as main areas of innovation.

"We have a chance, all of us in this room, to change the world in a positive way," Ballmer said.

Tools Announced

Ballmer told the audience that IT is probably the top transformer of society today, along with health care and education. Microsoft announced some advances in its developer tools to help the audience change the world. None of these, however, were unexpected.

Announced Monday and demonstrated on stage were Visual Studio 2005 Team System, Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0, and a technical preview of the Office Information Bridge Framework.

Visual Studio 2005 Team System is an expansion to Microsoft's developer tools to allow all members of an IT organization to work together. It is due to ship at the same time as Visual Studio 2005, also known by its Whidbey code name, in the first half of 2005.

Available immediately, WSE 2.0 is an add-on to Visual Studio .Net to help developers create and work with Web services that have been secured using the latest Web services protocol specifications.

The Office Information Bridge Framework is a set of tools to help developers bring Web services into Office products such as Word and Outlook.

While Microsoft has used similar events to evangelize .Net and Web services, Ballmer's speech Monday showed that .Net and Web services are now accepted, says Peter Pawlak, a lead analyst at Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm.

"Microsoft's bet on .Net and Web services has been the right bet," he says. Ballmer said over half of the developers in the U.S. now use its .Net developer tools. He also trumpeted Microsoft's work to create open Web services standards, citing work with IBM and others as well as standards organizations.

"Our company has made a greater investment in interoperability over the last four, five years than people ever give us credit for," Ballmer said.

Seeking More

The demonstrations of the new tools were impressive, but the demonstrators clicked through their screens too fast for attendees to follow, says Chad Layman, a corporate systems integrator at SM&P Utility Resources in Carmel, Indiana, attending the conference. Layman enjoyed Ballmer's overview, but says it didn't give him much to take home and start working on.

Despite his upbeat talk of IT as a world-changing force over the next decade, Ballmer said IT departments will continue to face budget constraints and security problems. If security is not addressed confidence in IT could be lost, which would be devastating, according to Ballmer.

Microsoft is not releasing here an anticipated beta of Visual Studio 2005. A company official, however, hints the beta might be released at the end of June at Tech Ed Europe in Amsterdam.