Student Technology Day: "Windows Cloud" revealed

Steve Ballmer was next door in the Queen Elizabeth Hall talking to the TechNet/TechEd people about Office Live, and mentioning that there would be a major announcement at the PDC on the 27th October. Once he finished there, he popped next door and told us a similar thing.

From talking to a few TechNet people afterwards during tea and biscuits (awfully British), they’re letting loose into the wild “Windows Cloud”, a temporary name for a service which will most likely have a more interesting name by the time it’s launched. Ballmer said:

“Just like Windows Server looked a lot like Windows, but with new properties, new characteristics and new features, so will Windows Cloud; it’ll look a lot like Windows Server.”

Whilst he made it clear when he spoke to us later on that Google was their main rival, they don’t always see other companies as major rivals. They know that Facebook has a much bigger user base than Windows Live Spaces, and work together with them by swapping and buying stocks and shares. Not every company is seen as a threat, he made clear.

With this, Office Live will probably be evolved into a more beautiful, streamlined surface. I asked him in the Q&A session about the future of Office Live and what’ll come next.

“Office Live has a few things left it needs to do. Number one, and probably most important, is to make sure that people using Office have greater ability to collaborate with one another. We have some of that today with [Office Live] Workspaces, as well as that we’ve got SharePoint; we can do more and some of those things will be better than the other alternatives.

Number two, is when we do Office Live, it has to be true to Office; you’ll need to be able to have full Office documents and programs and share them.

Number three, we have to make it so that - most people use Office most of the time from a single machine. But if you’re away from your desk, at a cafe, a kiosk or your school library, and you don’t have Office, you’ll want to be able to do something quickly; we have to make sure you can get it easily, stream it down, put it in a browser, something like that there… details coming in a few weeks.

So we have a number of things we’re doing. Exactly what we’ll announce I’m going to wait and let you guys sit it out until October 27th.”

So, a streamed, web-browser’d version of Office; sounds like a plan. I must say, Ballmer may be all rich, powerful, famous and all mighty, but it doesn’t show. He is genuinely a gentle, kind and caring bloke; who cares passionately not just about developers, but “students students students!”