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BOCA RATON, FLORIDA -- Finally the truth comes out about Microsoft's obssessive focus on Web services and seamless application interoperability: Steve Ballmer and his wife can't synchronize their respective calendars.

Ballmer admitted in a keynote here Thursday that while he may be Microsoft's chief executive officer, he doesn't hold that title at home. There his wife is the chief executive and he is, at best, chief operating officer, he said, and Mrs. Ballmer has determined that the calendar is their household's most important application.

"My wife thinks my getting home on time is a mission-critical application. She would like to see me frequently merge [our calendars] and make sure my calendar fits with her calendar," Ballmer told attendees at the Microsoft Latin America Enterprise Solutions Conference 2002.

Scheduling Conflicts

But there's a problem: Mr. Ballmer keeps his calendar in Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange at work, while Mrs. Ballmer keeps her calendar on the Microsoft MSN Web site.

"I can't just drag her calendar and drop it on my calendar and do a comparison. I want to do that, but there's no lingua franca for the way you would do that. There's no user interface metaphor. I want to be able to do enterprise application integration at the Ballmer family level," he said.

But he can't.

And this is one big problem motivating Steve Ballmer to make the .Net architecture, based on XML, a reality.

".Net is everything we need to do to ... make sure that the end user can take data that you give them in XML format, and they can manipulate it, they can display it, they can compare it, they can do what Mrs. Ballmer would like me to do," Ballmer said.

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