Steve Ballmer comments on Microsoft’s cloud plans

On October 17th in the “Redmond Channel Partner Online”, a Microsoft Partner community publication, Kurt Mackie reported on Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer’s comments on the company’s vision for syncing up applications in the Internet cloud. Although Ballmer held back on much of the details he did say that Microsoft is planning to release big news on this topic at its Professional Developers Conference, which is scheduled to take place on Oct. 27 in Los Angeles.

According to Ballmer, Microsoft’s applications will not have to be rewritten to run in the cloud, “but we’ll encourage developers to do something to make apps more manageable at a higher level,”.

“It’s a transformation for our business, but I don’t think we’ll be buying all of the world’s data servers,” he said. Instead, Microsoft will have to “service-enable our partners and customers.”

Ballmer also denied that Google was Microsoft’s most significant competition. He said that Microsoft’s main challenges are the open source business model and getting good at advertising for the consumer market.