Steve Ballmer - Quick chat with Microsoft's CEO | scobleizer

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

By the way, the lady who snuck behind Steve at the beginning of the interview is Katy Hunter, his assistant. She helped me arrange the interview, so owe her a debt of gratitude. Getting on his schedule is really tough!

yankovic

He is not only the head of a $300 billion organization, but is personally worth >$10 billion. Yet he really looks very passionate about what he's doing and the company. Maybe it's just his personality, but I'm astounded. He sits down and talks to the video camera just like any other guy.

http://ironyuppie.com

m00n1

Hang on, this is channel 9. What happened to the one hour long rambling interview? This is actually short, sharp and to the point. More like this please!

Congrats on the scoop though!

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

m00n1: It was supposed to be longer but his schedule got cut so we only had 10 minutes. But, I'm getting feedback to make our videos shorter and tighter, so we'll work on that.

m00n1

10 minutes is great! Personally, I'd make all interviews 20 minutes max. IMHO it's very rare an interview is interesting for longer than 20 minutes (ironically ballmer would probably be one of those but I suspect getting an hour on his schedule would be harder than winning the lottery).

jamie

hes pretty funny ill say that

you always read about the banging of fists and clapping of hands etc - but you never really see it (except for the famous dance routine)

good work steve - thanks for talking to scoble and channel 9

get a blog - or maybe Vloging would be better for you - so people can feel slightly uncomfortable wondering if your a brilliant ceo - or a raving lunatic haha

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

I'm sure Steve will monitor this thread & follow up on any question we might have Smiley

so here are mine:

How long will Longhorn take to go mainstream?

MS seems to be moving towards stadards more these days, has MS given up on the "platform that wins" (obviously on the server side) and going with platform that co-exists?

Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde

Very cool...

Some comments on this interview:

Good to see a CEO who trusts his employees!

What's with the whole "winning" thing? As a developer I am not so much interested in a battle between competing vendors as I am in evolving future-proofed standards. If I can write HTML I could care less if the browser is Microsoft or Mozilla or Mac. I don't want to worry about Microsoft-HTML vs. Mozilla-HTML vs. Mac-HTML.

Some suggestions for future videos:

Harder questions? You said the interview got cut short. What questions didn't you get to ask?

Transcripts will solve the long-interview problem - especially if they have timestamps associated with them. Make it a volunteer project if you don't want to assign staff.

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

>What questions didn't you get to ask?

I got to ask most of them. I had another softball question about what his day was like.

I don't usually prepare a whole lot of questions in advance. Usually I come up with them in response to what's going on.

If I had more time, I'd ask him more about some of the famous software industry stories.

Like being told he was wrong by Larry Osterman and still hiring him anyway.