LEVY: What’s the effect of the ruling on Microsoft? BALLMER: My wife asked me that. “What will you be doing differently on Monday? On Tuesday?” And the answer is not much. There’s some communication we have to have with employees to make sure they know why we respect-fully disagree with the court, and how important it is to stand up for our right to innovate. But basically by Wednesday it’ll be back to life as usual.
The judge seemed to think that your market position is secure for quite a while. I certainly respectfully disagree with that. I think most people in the press would. It’s funny that people will alternately write how strong our position is and question whether we’re relevant to the future. It certainly is a competitive world. I don’t think we were very successful in helping the judge to understand that.
Why weren’t your lawyers successful in that? I’m not an expert in that. We took our best shot, and we’ll continue to explain to people that it’s a competitive business. I think the judge doesn’t recognize the competitive nature of what we do, and in some cases we sit down with our partners and have very frank discussions about our interests. I think that’s in the best spirit of a partnership or marriage or anything else. But I do feel incredibly good about our integrity and incredibly good about our relationship with Intel, with Compaq and with Apple, which are some of the companies that got cited.
How important is it for you to settle and get this behind you? We’d certainly love to have this thing resolved, but we can’t do it in a way where we forfeit our right to improve and enhance and innovate on our products. We couldn’t do that six months ago, and we can’t do that today.
Judge Jackson contends that it wasn’t necessary to put Internet software in Windows. How crucial is this for you? Isn’t it obvious that any software product should reflect important trends in the business? Every company I know is talking about its e-strategy, and software has to transform itself for this. I can’t imagine that Windows will somehow be the only product that its creators can’t enhance to help consumers take advantage of the Internet.
Some people are saying that the drastic remedy of breaking up Microsoft is not only a viable remedy but something that could be good for Microsoft. That’s never crossed my mind. To the contrary, there is a real advantage of having us be a single, very well-focused customer company, applying a common research pool against a variety of problems. I want to highlight for people how much great stuff we have coming. I’d hate to have our shareholders or consumers think we’re occupied with trials, or that we don’t have our heads down trying to give them products that will benefit them amazingly. I fear there can be government restrictions that can make our lives very difficult, and that’s why we’re standing up for the right to innovate.
