I’ll be participating at a conference next week (together with another 200 people ) starring Steve Ballmer who will answer questions regarding “his career, his company and his vision of economics of knowledge” (which I would interpret as economics of intellectual property)

We’re often complaining how lame analysts’ questions are during conference calls, so I thought it might be a good idea to pool our brain cells to come up with the best question for Ballmer.
I’d rather avoid the Apple topic and simply confront him with a reality where he cannot respond with “we’re catching up on Google in the search business” or “the X-Box 360 is doing tremendously well” and finally “Vista is the best-selling OS of all time because it is the best OS we’ve built so far” (you get the idea)

I’ll try to sneak in a camcorder, who knows, Steve may perform another voodoo dance, squealing “developers, developers”

I wonder what his position is on patent and intellectual property reform.

Is IP law too restrictive in protecting the owners’/artists’ rights and keeping innovation low (imagine having to re-invent the wheel for every model car…) or is it too lax and keeping innovation low (why invent the wheel if someone will copy it tomorrow)? Where would the sweet spot lie in IT for keeping owners/creators happy and yet create a competitive environment to keep customers happy and the economy humming?

A more touchy spot would be where does he think that anti-trust law should start and end for the good of the economy. An answer of the kind: “what is good for business is good for America” is inadequate.

Re: A question for the "other" Steve?

[quote author=“MaCroissant”]I thought it might be a good idea to pool our brain cells to come up with the best question for Ballmer.

I’d be interested to see how he intends to capitalize on “the exebyte era” ( see this Fortune column ). The phrase was coined in a Cisco white paper asserting the internet will not collapse under the weight of video-centric network traffic, at least not any time soon. Others assert the marked increase in consumer-produced video content (18% of 2006 bandwidth vs 7% in 2005 - US numbers) will usher in future days of ‘web brownouts’.

Apple’s strategy is clear: position their products as the best way to bring consumer/creator media to the web, and then consume the content provided by others.

(Intellectual property tie-in: consumer-created content is typically submitted as open-commons with fewer restrictions on re-broadcast and marginal economic potential).

My proposed question: “Mr. Balmer, with video leading the charge of consumer-driven content filling out the dark fiber, what will Microsoft do in the next five years to capitalize on this trend?”

Could also turn it around and ask “what are the three biggest hurdles preventing Microsoft from capitalizing on this trend”, though this might lead to the dummy responses you’ve already offered!

you hit it right there—“what are the biggest hurdles?”

microsoft likes to act like they are god, like no challenge is too great for them. someone should ask balls what he’s scared of.

My suggestions:

1. Do Zune owners steal their music?

...or, if you’re feeling bold:

2. Mr. Ballmer, why are you such an ass monkey?

If you had it to do over again, would you again choose backward compatibility or increased security when developing Vista. 

Maybe someone can think of a better way to ask the above. 

The fact that Microsoft abandoned it’s longhorn path and used the code from server 2003 was the point in time where it became certain that Apple had great days ahead.  It appears that Microsoft ended up with the worst of all possible worlds.  People are unhappy with the security (spyware, trojans, viruses) of XP and reluctant to go through the pain of upgrading to Vista given that it doesn’t entirely fix the security issues.  There might be something that this common layman doesn’t fully understand (grok) but it strikes me as one of the worst business decisions of all time.

Most of us could write his answers for him, unfortunately. Ideally you want to ask a question whose motivation is not obvious, so that information leaks out alongside the predictable answer, or maybe which is plain awkward and puts him on the spot with no canned answer available. It would be interesting to know if he is on the ball when responding, or simply regurgitates what MS staffers tell him is the way things are.

My best shot (but he’d probably be too insulted to answer):

Is Bill Gates wrong to have dropped out of running Microsoft, or is spending taxes more fun than collecting them?

Why does Microsoft feel the need to go after successful markets created by others when it really doesn’t bring anything additional to the market?

OR

Why doesn’t Microsoft form partnerships with companies like Google and Apple as opposed to trying to take over their markets with competing products that really do not have much more to offer?

Thanks for all the interesting input everyone!

I’m always trying to imagine the answer to potential questions, and as sleepygeek pointed out, the “best” question contains no apparent insult (like attacking the OS, or a strategy) and appears to be benign at first, and should only start stinging while Ballmer gives his reply.

It’s a non-tech conference, meaning that 90% of the audience won’t have any idea about technical details, so I’m trying to think of a simple questions regarding either Microsoft’s past stance (regarding DRM, OS wars in relation to the antitrust EU lawsuit, etc…) or future projects (such as the expansion in the search business, etc…)

what do you guys think?
keep the comments coming, the more the better and merrier

It’d be nice to think that you could ask a question that would embarrass Ballmer, but the fact is you’d either be looked at as someone pissing in the soup, or he would deftly sidestep your question like any good politician.

Worse would be the softball question, “Steve, what do you think of insert here ( Apple, iPhone, iPod, etc.,)”  which just gives him a chance to brush aside with very faint praise and then launch into his sales pitch for the wonderful thing that MS is doing that is better than that.

Q. The retarded support among third party vendors for Vista has caused a great deal of frustration for users. Where does Microsoft lay the blame when a user has waited months for drivers that still have not materialised?

Ask Mr. Balmer what Microsoft’s time table is for removing Windows XP from the Market place.

“If Microsoft did not exist, what would be your 1st choice from among the other already exitsting major tech companies where you would like to be CEO and why?” Or if you are reluctant to name just one, give us a couple of names?

Unless he totally ignores the question (possible, of course), this should take him out of his prepared territory.

[quote author=“jimlongo”] “Steve, what do you think of insert here ( Apple, iPhone, iPod, etc.,)”  which just gives him a chance to brush aside with very faint praise and then launch into his sales pitch for the wonderful thing that MS is doing that is better than that.

Bingo. That’s exactly what he does; I think it’d be next to impossible to get him to give an answer about products/ competition that doesn’t come off as a slick sales pitch for all things M$.

Q. Why do you sweat so much and have you thought about being on Dancing with the Stars?  sorry, couldn’t help myself..

thinking along the lines of Capablanca

Mr Ballmer where would the personal computer industry be today if Microsoft never existed?