Nashville Tech Story (2/26/10)
In case you missed our January 20th Membership Breakfast, featuring Steve Ballmer, or if you just want a recap, Microsoft has provided his full speech word-for-word below:
STEVE BALLMER: It’s a real honor to have a chance to be with you today. I hope we provoke just a little bit of thought. There’s always a way to kind of capture people’s imagination about what will be possible, and I think in general in the short run people probably over-estimate what’s going to happen, and in the long run people almost always underestimate the amount of creativity and vision and innovation and how that’s going to wind up changing the world quite dramatically.
Take a look at a video like the one I just showed you, and you’d say, hmm, what’s he trying to say? They could do good videos, that might be No. 1, which of course we all can with the right budget. No. 2, we’re really talking about something that’s coming tomorrow, or No. 3, we really are talking about something that is real and practical over the course of the next five, six, seven years. And really that’s the case, and I think people would still underestimate just how far we can go over a very short period of time.
It’s interesting, I look out in the room here, and I get a chance to do a digital assessment from the stage. And you might say, hey, look, this is the National Technology Council, we’re really digitally on the forefront, and I think that’s probably right. And yet I look at even the two Microsoft guys sitting here that I know in the front row, and they’ve got paper and pencil out in front of them. They don’t look like they’re living in the video that we just showed you.
And so we see the opportunity to really change the technology, to make the hardware, the software easy enough, flexible enough, light enough, valuable enough, that people can really move and embrace new things.
I want to thank the technology council here in Nashville for inviting me to give this talk. It’s a pleasure to have a chance to be here with you. I think it’s been basically since I was a young kid probably sometime in the ’60s that I was here. So it’s a pleasure for me to get a chance to come back and for some refresh acquaintances, as Todd was talking about, and a chance to get to hear what a lot of folks involved and using technology here in Nashville are really thinking about.
I want to start kind of with a fundamental view of kind of the basic things that are going to evolve and change in information technology over the next several years. And as Todd was saying, yes, Steve’s been at Microsoft 30 years. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to bring my cane up on stage with me or give you sort of the “long and winding road” history of information technology or some combination of both.
But probably the most important thing is to remind people that essentially, at least as long as we can look back, and probably as long as we can look forward in any reasonable way, we see in about a five, six, seven year, maybe eight year cycle, we see these massive generational shifts that happen in information technology; the kind of shifts that everybody, not just people in our industry, everybody wakes up and groks and understands and falls in love with.
Click Here for More: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/steve/2010/01-20ntc.mspx
Ben Henderson, Partner / Senior Software Engineer, 
