Steve Ballmer is awesome

I was in the day 2 keynote at MIX08 today and it was one of the best keynotes I've seen. Guy Kawasaki was interviewing Steve Ballmer and in some cases, these things can be a total bomb, but Guy didn't pull any punches and Steve was a good sport and played along. For the most part he gave PR-ish answers, but with his own bit of candor that was refreshing. And when he got a question about giving some love for web developers he went into monkey-boy mode to big applause. Once the audience Q&A got started was where he really shined and where the RIA-interesting news was.

The first question about Adobe came up in the Q&A. Steve sounds excited about what Microsoft is doing and he said that Adobe is both a competitor and a customer, pretty standard stuff. Steve also talked about the benefits of competition a bit.

The biggest quote of the day came on a question about when Microsoft was going to start using Silverlight on more of their own properties. Steve said that "All of the relevant [Microsoft] products will move to Silverlight eventually". He said that as new products come online they'll be more likely to use Silverlight but he didn't think they needed to disrupt what was currently working to roll out new versions. That's pretty much what you'd expect because it would be tough for Microsoft to switch everything from Flash to Silverlight overnight. It's clearly a priority to use more Silverlight however.

There was also a question about Avenue A | Razorfish, the agency that Microsoft acquired as part of the aQuantive deal. He said that they value Avenue A | Razorfish and that even though Microsoft owns them, they have a very hands off take. As long as the agency is doing well, they'll operate pretty autonomously. He also said the agency is free to use Silverlight or "other competitive solutions" in their work.