Meeting Steve Ballmer in Munich...

A tie: I had not put one for two or three years, here with Steve Ballmer and Marcel Reichart

Sorry for not being very present on this blog these days, lots of traveling, I went last week to Munich to have dinner with Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO (OK we were about 50 people...) Thanks for the invite, Dr Hubert Burda and Marcel.

I spent a very nice evening even though Steve was a bit corporate in his speech. I was impressed by his charisma. I talked with him and asked a few questions:
"Are blogs important for Microsoft ?"
"Oh yeah, we now have about 20 million, and what about you, what's your occupation ?"
"I am with a small startup, a weblogs software company" I told him with my French accent...
"fantastic, how many do you have ?"
"about 10 million" -Steve is surprised
"and do you have a business model ?" -asks somebody else who just joined the conversation
"yes, yes, we have three brands and some of them have free offers but also very strong sales, such as TypePad and Movable Type"
and we continued talking. Steve was very interested to say the least. I collected a cool business card.

I asked another question after his speech, in public, this one.

"What do you think about the growth of collaborative and free software ? I am thinking about Firefox or Wikipedia compared to Internet Explorer and Encarta, do you see this as an important threat ?"
"It's interesting but as you are a blogger yourself, consider the fact that more and more bloggers get paid in some way to write, some of them because professionals. The question is clear. Sure, Microsoft is a commercial company but we answer one of the key question of our customers: be in charge in case of a problem or a question, provide somebody to talk to."

Actually, think about when you buy software or hardware, do you turn first to online resources or to the hotline of the supplier ? I check first blogs, forums, chat, sites to find my answer and most of the time I find it way quicker and better than if it was through some kind of call center.

I spent a very nice evening. Bonus: two short videos of Steve Ballmer's speech, unfortunately I did not record the part when he quoted Six Apart ;-) vidéo1 et vidéo2