Microsoft Unleashed
eWeek | at | by Mike
Put yourself in Steve Ballmer's shoes. With antitrust suits looming, you've been forced to ask yourself what a variety of judges and prosecutors would think about every major move you might make. But, following a settlement with the Department of Justice, the legal clouds have begun to lift, and you're freer now to act than any time in the last four years. So what do you do? You'd probably start looking around for new markets to conquer and, with $40 billion or so in the bank, maybe a few acquisitions. And that's exactly what Microsoft's CEO is doing.
"I put out a memo where we talked about our mission, where we talked about the fact that we're going to do new things," said Ballmer in an interview with eWeek editors and reporters at Microsoft headquarters here this month. "We were quite explicit that we need to enable new scenarios for our customers, which take us into new areas which could be [through] acquisition, could be [through] incubation," Ballmer said. Microsoft is looking at possible acquisitions in the areas of storage, security, and management and developer tools.