Will have to keep innovating to stay ahead: Ballmer

Even as he admitted he saw a lot of opportunity in the Indian market, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said the company would have to remake itself and innovate constantly to stay ahead of competition. He was speaking to students at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Ballmer said: “There are a lot of changes happening in the technological landscape and each offers a chance for innovation. One of the most important things is the development of natural user interface, which would involve teaching machines to interact the way humans do.” The company recently launched Microsoft Kinect that works in conjunction with Xbox and personal computers and detects motion.

He added: “Over time, we would have the technology that would enable us to talk to computing devices, including phones, personal computers, television and other smart and intelligent electronic devices.” Systems would not only recognise but also understand user requirements. They would facilitate communication over language barriers, he held.

He explained search engines today recognised nouns and indexed information but were not able to understand things in terms of verbs and actions required to be performed. An innovation in this regard, he hoped, would happen over a period of time.

Ballmer said Microsoft would continue to innovate on technologies related to the Xbox, Bing, Skype, Windows PC and Windows Phone, besides robotics. “We have a lot of work to do to stay ahead, to push ahead and to catch up in some areas… In areas we have had success, we have to remake ourselves. We have to innovate on productivity and back-end systems in computing.”

Responding to a question, the Microsoft CEO said it might sound futuristic and “crazy”, but there was a possibility that search engines would eventually be able to discern users’ thoughts. “One of our marketing personnel last week suggested that Bing should be called ‘mind reader’. We dream that these devices would be able to anticipate where we are, what we are doing and give us the information that we want. I think it is a possibility.”