HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer is known for his histrionic speaking style, and he did not disappoint during his recent Business School appearance, commandeering the stage like a seasoned performer. (Staff photos Kris Snibbe/Harvard News Office)

The 24th richest person in the world made a visit to the Harvard Business School (HBS) last week (Dec. 7), and gave an audience of 700 advice on how to succeed in business: Have passion, curiosity, and empathy.

Microsoft CEO Steven Anthony Ballmer '77 (whose net worth is around $14 billion) also shared his vision of the high-tech industry's future: It's bright.

"The next 10 years will be hotter than the last 10 years," he said - surpassing the past decade with its huge new global markets for PCs, cell phones, the Internet, and digital cameras. (Microsoft's already grabbed its share. About 800 million PCs - 90 percent of the world's computers - use Microsoft Windows.)

The hot years start now, said Ballmer, enumerating what Microsoft rolled out in the past month: Windows Vista (the company's first new operating system in five years), Microsoft Office 2007, and Zune, the Microsoft brand of portable media players.

Looking further out, Ballmer predicted technological revolutions in storage, telecommunications power, connectivity, and desktop and group productivity.

"We're working on the future of meetings," Ballmer said, "one of the forms of human interaction that have been least affected by technology." In the future, he said, events like the one in HBS's Burden Auditorium could include wireless video-streaming in real time. Listeners will not only capture and store what is going on, but make their own notations in real time, and instant-message with other participants.

"Meetings will be completely reinvented in the next 10 years," said Ballmer, who in 1980 became Microsoft's 30th employee.

In the same decade, he said, the Internet will grow faster as a delivery system for television, with built-in interactivity. (Ballmer imagined watching a great Tiger Woods putt on TV - then alerting Bill Gates to watch a replay. "Bill will probably be watching something more intellectual on his television set," said Ballmer.)

Another coming revolution will involve reading. "It is stunning today that we still read a lot of what we read on paper," said Ballmer. "At Microsoft, we're working on the backbone for digital reading."

To keep an eye on what the future holds, Microsoft has devised 70 "quests," in order to "stay involved broadly in the technology landscape," said Ballmer. "The world's going to change in amazing ways."

To respond, Microsoft is using a "multicore" approach, said Ballmer, "to have at least four muscles that are all very different."

Two of them are in place already, he said. Desktop productivity was the company's original venture. Then came "enterprise computing," designed to support businesses.

One of the two new "muscles" Microsoft is putting in place involves technologies for online advertising. "The world has only scratched the surface of digital advertising," said Ballmer.

The second is the ever-shifting world of entertainment devices. Zune did not come too late into the market (which is dominated by Apple's iPod), said Ballmer, because that category will constantly change and get transformed. "Unless you think the category's static," he said, "even if you're later than you'd like to be, you get in."

The Microsoft CEO offered some advice to the MBA students: Have well-defined goals, and keep moving.

"As we look to our future, we say explicitly we're going to do things," said Ballmer.

As for momentum, he said, "Companies have to be like sharks. Either you move forward into other areas, or you die."

That means hard work, said Ballmer, who paced on the stage as he talked, and often punctuated his advice with hand slaps and repetition. "We're just there every day," he said of Microsoft workers, "working, working, working - driving."

Meanwhile, the mystique of the technology business - that innovation happens overnight - is false, Ballmer cautioned.

It took Microsoft eight or nine years to develop Windows, and Google nearly the same amount of time "to get to critical mass," he said. "Everything in our industry takes a very long-term approach."

Innovation has got to be a big part of "the A game," but it doesn't happen fast and it takes an investment in human capital, said Ballmer. "It all starts with the right people."

When keeping track of technology, financials, and employees seems overwhelming, Ballmer said he remembers "the one business course that had the biggest impact on me."

As a Harvard undergraduate, he studied how to manage arts organizations with Thomas J.C. Raymond, who died in 2005 after teaching at HBS since 1950.

Microsoft, like many other companies that grew up as innovators, is a lot like an arts organization, said Ballmer - that is, full of people who want to change the world. Ballmer described software engineers as the artists of the industry, whose way of proceeding was less motivated by profits than by the swirling, indirect "Brownian motion" of creativity.

(Brownian motion describes the apparent random motion of minute particles in a liquid.)

A sharp question from the audience suggested that the smartest people work for Google, or want to. In answer, Ballmer - famous for his stage antics - threw off his blue blazer and tossed it on the stage.

"We have a lot more talent than any other company - that one, or any other in our industry," Ballmer said. He described 2006 as the best recruiting year ever for Microsoft.

But Ballmer admitted that the software giant has more work to do, especially in search and in digital advertising, where "Google is clearly the market leader."

Still, it is good to have competition for talent, he said, after 26 years without any. "There are good reasons, I'm sure, to work for Google," said Ballmer, "though I'd be hard-pressed to give you one."

With its wide range of projects and its history of fast promotion, Microsoft, asserted Ballmer, is a better bet to work at than Google.

He told the Google questioner, "Post my e-mail address to all those friends of yours who are making bad decisions." (Just minutes into his 70-minute visit - half of it questions and answers - Ballmer gave the audience his e-mail address. "I'm a sales guy," he explained.)

It was an e-mail that got Ballmer to HBS in the first place. Oded Ran M.B.A. '07, president of HBS's TechMedia Club, was a summer intern at Microsoft this year, along with club vice president Gautam Nadella, M.B.A. '07. While out in Redmond, Wash., they asked about a visit. "Terrific," said Ballmer. "Shoot me an e-mail."

Anthony Garcia, co-president of the MediaTech Club at the MIT Sloan School of Management, helped arrange the event. About 80 MIT students arrived on rented buses.

Ballmer, who was in Boston on other business, "was very excited and hyped and into it," said Ran of the event. "Students asked him very good questions. We thought they would be more confrontational, but they decided to be polite."

About 250 speakers come to the HBS campus every year, said spokeswoman Kerry Parke. Most of them are sponsored by HBS clubs, of which there are 75.

corydon_ireland@harvard.edu