Steve Ballmer is a very loud man

Real-time blogging: Steve Ballmer just completed a fairly dry, but very loud, sales presentation for Windows Vista and Microsoft Office System for his keynote at Software 2007. More about that later. However, the Q&A session was much more interesting; M.R. Rangaswami, the conf. chairman, did a nice job… they weren’t all softballs.

One question/answer is worth sharing. The question was about Microsoft’s agreement with Novell. Ballmer responded calmly, at first, that “What we did with Novell is form a relationship around their Linux specifically. Our goal was to achieve better interoperabilty, and to ensure that our intellectual property was properly licensed.”

He then continued at the decibel level of a jet engine, and I’ll do it in caps bold to capture the effect:

“DO WE COMPETE WITH WINDOWS AGAINST LINUX? ABSOLUTELY!! DON’T BE CONFUSED!!! IF YOU COME TO US TO TALK ABOUT LINUX, WE’LL TRY TO SELL YOU WINDOWS. BUT IF YOU REALLY WANT TO USE LINUX, WE WANT YOU TO USE IT IN A WAY THAT’S PROPERLY LICENSED AND INTEROPERABLE.”

Classic Ballmer.