Excerpts from Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft’s speech:

“Let me first say thanks to Anil and the team at Reliance. It is great to be here today. Both companies have put in a lot of time and energy into getting a deal.

But it speaks to how important and broad is the that Reliance has, for next generation entertainment services here in India, and is spending time to get the right technology framework and commercial framework in place. I am sure it will be invaluable, as the companies drive forward into the marketplace, with these new technologies.

All of the world’s information and entertainment will move to be digitised. Everything will move across IP networks. Newspapers, magazines, television, voice communication, video conferencing and everything that can be digitised will be digitised. And it won’t be digitised in part, because it will be less expensive in the long run. But it will be digitised in large measure because there are just so many more things that we can do, when we have the power of an intelligent IP network and smart software around it, to enhance the kinds of experiences that we are talking about.”

Steve Ballmer heads the world’s largest technology company, he is here exclusively to talk about technology and its future. To add their very valuable insights are two of leading Indias CEOs - S Gopalakrishnan of Infosys and Aditya Puri of HDFC Bank.

Excerpts from an exclusive interview with Steve Ballmer, S Gopalakrishnan and Aditya Puri:

Q: I have been reading a bit about how Google is expected to announce its big mobile software initiative. Mobile software seems to be the next big thing for every software company, how would you assess how far Microsoft has reached in this space and how well prepared you are to take on anything from Google?

Ballmer: We have been investing in mobile software technology now for almost 10 years. We will ship over 20 million mobile phones this year with our software built in, which is a very large number but very small number compared to the 1.3 billion mobile phones that chip worldwide. I think the opportunity to bring intelligence services to the mobile world is a big one.

It is an important one for the consumer, it is an important one for the institutions, the banks and other companies that want to do business with people when they are on the road. We have got a great set of software, ofcourse, we welcome all competitors.

Q: The next question is something you have been asked often enough, what about a Microsoft phone, because till now you have been putting your software on higher end phones, enterprise related phones? Are we looking at a Microsoft phone at all?

Ballmer: I think the smartest strategy for a company like ours will be to continue to do software that we can integrate and embed with hardware phones, not just expensive phones, but increasingly more and more economical, lower end phones from a cost perspective, which then a variety of companies bring to the market. When you really think about a market as broad as the mobile phone market is today, we really want to have our software some day in hundreds of millions of phones. The best way to do that I think is in partnership with the incredible companies in this world who make phones.

Q: How do you see the competitive landscapes change; even Nokia, the largest mobile phone maker in the world, is repositioning itself to become an Internet services company. And you have got Google on one end, Symbian, which is pretty well entrenched on the other, you have got Nokia on one more, wanting to reposition itself. Who will you be competing with over the next five years in the mobile space?

Ballmer: We do not really know for sure. I think one of the things that we all probably had a chance to learn from the dotcom boom and bubble, was that the degree to which industry boundaries get redrawn is actually not that large. Our industry is an industry of partnership, and that partnership I think tends to create greater value, like the partnership that we have for example with Infosys and a number of other companies. It is just so big, so important for the growth in this business overall. So, Nokia, sure we have some overlap. We are also a partner, a partner with many of the important companies.

Q: But you didn’t confirm whether you would be interested in a phone; you said it would just be restricted to software as of now?

Ballmer: Right now, from our perspective we do phones, we just do not build hardware. We build the software, we work in partnership and I think that strategy will remain our strategy for the future.

Q: How would you qualify the mobile space in terms of the next few most exciting spaces of technology, over the next 10 years where would you rate it, as the topmost?

Gopalakrishnan: It is one of the interesting developments because the number of mobile phones far exceeds the number of PCs, especially in a country like India. To deliver applications on the mobile phone and link it up with all the existing applications like banking or booking train tickets using the cellphone, it is very exciting.

Q: Is this a large part of your revenue, is this where a large amount of your R&D money goes into?

Gopalakrishnan: This is where the R&D money goes, developing applications which can be deployed on top of cellphones. But existing revenue comes from helping them with their billing system or their internal operation systems.

Q: You don’t sound very excited about the mobile opportunities. Are there other spaces that you think would be even better, bigger or more interesting from an Infosys’ perspective?

Gopalakrishnan: Mobile is one of the channels we use or one of the ways we can deploy our applications. To us it is just a one more channel to deploy applications.

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