Ballmer: Stop worrying and turn off CNBC

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer agrees it’s hard to tell how the Wall Street crisis will play out, but his comments Thursday indicate he thinks tech may be insulated from it.
Ballmer was the guest speaker at a Churchill Club dinner that drew 550 people to the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara.
While members of the Congress, White House and U.S. Treasury Department were pulling their hair out trying to craft a bailout bill to prevent credit markets from collapsing, Ballmer said people he’s close to in the tech industry still see a certain “buoyancy.”
“For now, people in our business are feeling better than if they watched CNBC all day,” he told Ann Winblad, a partner in Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, who interviewed him onstage at the event.
While he admitted that the tech industry is not immune to the changes and challenges in the global economy, the latest crisis on Wall Street hasn’t impacted software companies yet. To be sure, Microsoft had a rosy June quarter, its most recent, with an 18 percent increase in revenue to $15.8 billion, versus the year ago quarter, a 42 percent increase in operating revenue to $5.7 billion and a 48 percent increase in earnings per share to $0.46. Still, that was almost three months ago, when even people like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson were telling us everything was under control. It’s hard to believe even a company like Microsoft can be insulated from some adverse effect. If credit markets collapse because no bailout plan is produced or the one created fails, companies will have difficulty borrowing money for operating or capital budgets to be spent on new computer software.
Surprisingly, little was said at the Churchill Club forum about Microsoft’s failed bid to acquire Yahoo earlier this year. Microsoft sought the $31 a share deal to better position itself against search engine leader Google. Yahoo and Microsoft are distant second and third place finishers, respectively.
Ballmer took a few questions from the audience, including one from an obviously irate PC user: “When are you going to fix Windows Vista so it works?” the man asked from the back of the ballroom. Vista has been notoriously buggy since its debut in 2007 and many critics say Vista is proof that operating systems are getting too big and unwieldy for their own good.
“I’ll fix your PC myself so it works,” Ballmer cracked, then argued that Microsoft has 5,000 people continuing to work on improving Vista and said that while people might be having problems with Vista, overall, every new Windows operating systems is better than the preceding one.