6:16PM PT - The joint's filling up fast! Clearly no one's on stage yet, though, so don't go too far.
6:27 - Announcer welcomes Les Hinton, CEO of Dow
Jones. Applauding Walt and Kara, discussing the "change in ownership,"
talking News Corp. Errr.
6:30 - Welcoming out Walt and Kara... aaand here they are.
6:31 - Mossberg: "It's been a turbulent year for a lot of these companies." Swisher: "It's been a big news year." Indeed it has.
6:36 - They want to have a Bill + Steve redux, except this time the Steve is Ballmer, not Jobs. Playing the Gates retirement video from CES.
6:43 - Stiiiiiiiill playing the video. It's still pretty good though, and they added a few new clips here and there.
6:46 - All done! Mossberg: Ladies and gentlemen, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer!
6:47 - Taking it back to
the beginning, what kind of classmate/roommate was Bill in college? "He
was a pretty shy guy... quiet, kind of shy, but a certain kind of
spark. Especially later in the day, early in the morning. Bill was
usually going to bed by the time I was waking up." Bill's talking about
how he constantly played hookey.
6:50 - Ballmer talking about how Gates came and went Harvard. Gates: "You can leave and come back!" Say, is that a hint about Bills retirement? Ballmer's talking up his time spent at Procter and Gamble. Mossberg: Was it about then that you tried to hire Steve? Gates: "Not yet..." they were still way early on in the company.
6:53 - Mossberg: Did you wait to finish business school? Ballmer: "This is classic. Gates calls, 'Hey, what are you doing? Oh, god, too bad you don't have a twin brother or something...' he didn't just come out and say anything. 'Too bad, too bad -- and he hung up!' That was the sales call!"
6:54 - Gates on the early days: "We had so many customers, so many choices about what we could do next. We've always managed the company very conservatively." Talking anecdotally about how early-Microsoft wanted to have enough in the bank to pay its employees for a year if their customers stopped paying. "I had this very conservative view of our financial limits."
6:57 - Ballmer: "I wondered, why did I leave Stanford business school for this?" Eventually Bill gave him the real pitch: "We can put a computer on everyone's desk." Gates: "I needed Steve. I needed the skills he had, I needed a partner." Ballmer: "Bill said, 'Prove we can hire one good guy, and we'll hire 2-18'... and that became our management approach!" Ballmer says Microsoft hedges all its bets, takes all its risks technologically -- "Why take financial risks?"
7:03 - Mossberg: There's this perception that [Bill's] the technology guy, and [Steve's] the sales guy. Is that right? Bill: They've been jointly involved in a lot of crossover stuff, "Steve and I have done all this stuff together." Ballmer: Discussing working on the Windows 1.0 as a project manager. (Remember that infomercial?) "I'm not an engineer!"
7:04 - Swisher: Would you call yourself a businessman? Gates: "Sure. Sales minus costs equals profits. Is there more?" Big laughter. Mossberg: Did it bug you that Bill blew up and became extremely famous? Ballmer: "No. ... It was always clear Bill was the senior partner and I was the junior partner... it's never bothered me at all."
7:08 - Swisher: Do you still get veto on company decisions? Gates: "No." Says he's become the junior partner when he swapped roles with Ballmer. Mossberg asking about Bill's participation these days and going forward. "It's a very different role" he's taking on. Ozzie and Mundie have stepped up, and he's looking to Steve to help pick and choose his future projects.
7:12 - Ballmer: "I want to
know what [Bill] thinks." Swisher wants to talk Yahoo! Ballmer gives
the quick rundown of events to date. "We are not rebidding for the
company -- we reserve the right to do so, but it's not on the docket."
Swisher: What are you interested in, in Yahoo? Ha, they're wheeling out
a whiteboard for Ballmer to diagram his explanation. Swisher: "This is
like crack for him." Ballmer discussing ads, bidders, search, and the
scale of it all. "To accelerate scale, it made sense for us to look at
Yahoo!'s business."
7:17 - Ballmer says they're still in talks with Yahoo! about a "partnership." Swisher mentions that Ballmer's model of competing with Google is reminiscent of a monopoly. Ballmer gives the who, me? look. Gates: "Guys like us avoid monopolies because we compete!" Naturally, the lot of that exchange was all very tongue-in-cheek.
7:20 - Ballmer: "You need scale, you need business and technology innovation. Large and small... this is a funny marketplace in which to say you're cheaper [than the competition]." Swisher: What's the key element" Ballmer: "The most important thing is that we have a good team and that we're patient." And money -- investment. Ballmer's getting super intense. Mossberg: "You're getting a little scary there." Ballmer: "WELL, YOU GOT THE REAL ME!" Dude, this is Steve, what do you want?
7:24 - Mossberg wants to talk Vista. "Is Vista a failure? Is it a mistake?" Ballmer: "It's not a failure, it's not a mistake. Are there things we'll modify and improve going forward? Sure." Gates is mum, smiling off into the distance. Bet he can't wait to wash his hands of this stuff.
7:26 - Ballmer: "Let me ask Bill..." is Vista up to your expectations compared to '95 and 3.0? Gates: "There's no product that we've ever shipped that was 100% of what I wanted. That's part of the magic of software, people give you feedback... and you get to make a new version. ... We have a culture of 'we need to do better."
7:28 - Ballmer: "There are two unique things: in a lot of our Windows releases in the past, we've always had a second stream. With 95 we were introducing NT in the background... the number one thing people found jarring [with Vista] was that we changed the UI. ... That was ironic." Mossberg: Will you show us a little bit of Windows 7? Ballmer: "Sure! This is the smallest snippet of Windows 7. It's just a small little snippet.'"
7:29 - "This is 'likely to ship within three years of general availability of Vista.'" Demo time! It does multi-touch!
7:35 - They worked with the
Surface team on the multi-touch stuff. Microsoft is re-thinking the
whole user interface to better accommodate multi-touch for day to day
use.
7:39 - Swisher and
Mossberg: So, what does this represent? Is this the next phase of the
way people will do day to day work on their computers? Gates: "We're at
an interesting junction... in the years to come, the roles of speech,
vision, ink, all of those will become huge. I showed what an
intelligent whiteboard would be like."
7:43 - "For the person at home and the person at work, that interaction will change dramatically." Talking about the single-user interfaces we have today. Mossberg: This is 15-18 months from release, your friends in Cupertino probably have one more turn before you get this out the door. They have the iPhone, which is on the market today... is there a risk that the work you're doing here will look like they got there first? Ballmer: "There's a lot in Windows 7, and our goal's got to be, with our hardware partners, to produce fantastic PCs. ... We'll sell 270m PCs a year, and Apple will sell 10m. Apple is fantastically successful, and so are we."
7:45 - Ballmer's talking about Microsoft's "real opportunity" to improve things in the future -- which is another way of saying that things could be better, but there's no real specific commitment to making the Windows experience better.
7:47 - Mossberg's drilling Bill on the Mac vs. PC, Bill's reticent. Ballmer: "Every share point Apple picks up is a share point we don't like. ... But it depends on what your goal is. We like selling 290m units. ... Our model is better." Mossberg: But you CAN'T be happy with this Vista situation? Ballmer: "What's the appropriate response? I kind of like what Bill already said." Gates: "You're kind of repeating yourself." Ouch. Big applause.
7:51 - Q from the internet: Do you feel the unsuccessful pursuit of Yahoo! has tarnished Microsoft at all? Ballmer: "No. ... at very least, people now know we're serious about our online business."
7:53 - Talking about the phone market, Mossberg and Ballmer are debating unit volume between Nokia, RIM, Windows Mobile, Apple. On Android, Ballmer: "It's another person taking another crack at the pie. ... Google comes late, without experience, and no clear business model. ... But we take them seriously."
7:54 - Open floor for Gates as he transitions out of Microsoft: "It probably is the last time I'll get to speak here..." Nawwwwww. "Melinda will be speaking Thursday, you'll hear from here why this will be a fun journey."
7:58 - Audience questions, but unfortunately none have been all that interesting so far.
8:02 - O'Reilly: You set out to put a computer on every desk -- and you achieved that. So do you have a new audacious goal? Gates talking about the future and goals of how Microsoft thinks the future will look. Interactive TV, tablet PC, and so on.
8:08 - Question about apps in the browser, and what that means for the future of software. Ballmer doesn't think it's all or nothing.
Okay, that's it!
Photo: Asa Mathat, AllThingsD
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Transcript follows:
A couple of years ago Howard Stringer had high hopes for his e-reader. But Jeff Bezos Kindle has stolen that thunder, and we assume we might hear about that when Walt Mossberg chats with him. We definitely know we're about to see a very, very thin TV.
Howard comes out to "Turning Japanese" (do the D6 folks know what that song is supposedly about?).
So Sir Howard, how are things going? "We're coming on, I think... culturally the word "profit" is not high on anybody's agenda in Japan. We're turning that around... there's a sort of sense that we're climbing the mountain. We're nowhere near the top, we're about halfway up."
But TVs are doing well, right? Yeah, but we're not making any money: "If we have any more success we'll be bankrupt". Why can't you make money? It's a commoditzed business. Lots of overhead from old biz we've exited, and race for market share puts pressure on prices.
What's next, beyond the LCD? LCD has had a good run, has plenty of life in it. But now getting excited about OLED. Very expensive at the moment, but is in the market. $2,500 for an 11" screen. DreamWorks guys like it a lot. I have one on my desk. It's really, really bright. Time to see the demo:
As we worried, it's really really hard to get a sense of what an OLED screen looks like when you're looking at on stage. But, as predicted, here comes the 0.3 mm thick OLED, thickness of a playing card. Will come out in 27-inch version fairly soon. Not at mass market quantity, and it will be "quite expensive... the only people who can buy one are in this room."
Do you believe that this will supplant LCD? "I'm biased. I have mine on my desk, and I haven't turned on the wall screen since I've had it. It's a perfect television companion."
Making these panels yourself? Yes. Very technolgically sophisticated. Can't outsource.
PS3: Profitable business yet (no, it's not). Downward slope of PS3 curved was "mildly catastrophic" for a while... "was on life support" but is booming now. "We're very pleased". Becomes a server, movies, Playstation network has 5 million people, and we'll demo new one coming. The next game out, in June, will use full capacity of game machine, which no one really has done yet.
Are people really using it as a movie machine/entertainment hub? They're starting to. And we're connecting it to PSP, other machines, etc. It's the beginning of a sequence of a train of events that will ulimately be fairly thrilling - MSFT and AAPL trying to do same, of course. We won DVD format battle because of Blu-ray player in PS3.
Walt: I thought you won the battle because you paid off the studios? Howard: No, we didn't pay as much as the other guys. It cost us because we had to cut Blu-ray player price way down, but we weren't in the check-writing competition. We have great suport from the studios.
OK, so you won the next-gen DVD format war. What's the real value in that, as things are moving to digital downloads? "We live in the Silicon corridor up here, and we think that the things that are happening to us are happening to everybody...but it's going to be a long time, I think, before you can get the quality you can get on Blu-ray... I agree, it was a lot of wasted money on this battle... but we wanted [the format] to last for 10 years and beyond" But a bit of candor from Howard here: Had we lost the war, "the headline would have been `BetaMax 2'. And that would have been on my tombstone."
Walt disagrees about "Silicon Corridor" idea. Lots of people have digital music players. So the idea isn't new. Howard: Billion new movie customers coming online in Asia. They agree to disagree, basically.
How about movies in general, what's going with that business and what will become of it? Still sticking around. Shared experience important. People said rock concerts on way out, but they're picking back up again (not completely true, really).
PC business? Best year ever last year. 7% margin. But marketshare is down, right? Why aren't you #1 or #2 PC vendor? Because we're very expensive. Is this a strategy? "Yes. The less profit the better." Our engineers like trying to being on the cutting edge...compares his company to Apple (but Apple enjoys very nice margins on its hardware).
Walt taking Howard to task over "craplets" on his Sony computers (this is a big thing for Walt). Wants him to take anti-craplet pledge. Howard won't bite. "You're not a typical consumer." Not true! says Walt. Everyone's got my back on this! Howard: "I promise you a craplets review."
Digital music players: We've sold about 170 million music-enabled phone. Way more than iPods. Sold that in the space of a year and half to two years. We started music phone trend! Were doing more and more downloading relationships. We've got one with Usher (who's a Sony BMG act). The music player itself, overshadowed, is coming back a bit (we've heard this ourselves). "We're a long way off. But we're back in the game. We recognize our failings, and we keep trying."
Are the days of stand-alone players numbered? Nah. There's room for two devices, or three devices.
Q from audience: How do you keep innovating across wide range of products? It's hard. You can see dilemma with Sony Reader and Kindle. People say we're not innovating, but we're innovating on all of our products. Plus, we've got the Rolly! But it's tricky to find entrepreneuers in company, especially in Japan, who can create small-scale success with new products. There isn't that tradition in Japan. Trying to find way to mimick it, so we can have some excitement. Making Sony a home for entrepreneuers is the next big challenge. "Did I answer your question?" "That was brilliant" "Really? Are you looking for a job?"
What's going on with telco v. cable faceoff? Talking about non-settop TV deal announced yesterday. We've been pushing for it for a long time. It's a "singular achievement for us", done mainly with Comcast leading the charge. "There are gatekeepers everywhere, guarding their turf. Sometimes I'm sympathetic, but not often... on the other hand, I'm open to the Tim-Berners Lee approach, which is to make it open."
Can you ever get software that works as well as your hardware? Maybe. Look for our home game network. We've hired an excellent software guy but I'm not going to point him out because you'll all chase after him. But this is also an organization challenge. Software has to work across multiple platforms. Don't laugh but we're now thinking about software at beginning of process instead of the end.
Steve "Insanely Great" Levy: Wants to know what Howard thinks about iTunes, basically:
"I have my own hositlites to the iTunes experience." I know it's unpopular in this room, but AC/DC, for instance, never released their music on iTunes. They think their body of work should stand on its own. They don't want to sell singles, and iTunes insists on it. I think competitior to iPod very healthy.
Music labels "have learned our lesson" and are working with artist, trying to find new ways to express themselves. "The vanishing album is problem that I'm concerned about. Maybe I'm just old."
Event ends - Howard tells Walt "This wasn't as funny as last time"
