Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said his company was winning the battle for productivity applications in the cloud, and when it’s winning, it’s taking customers away from Google. And in doing so, he invoked a little bit of Charlie Sheen in showing his enthusiasm about network-based applications.
“Everything is a little earlier days than all the rhetoric,” Ballmer said. “But we’re winning, winning, winning, winning.”
Ballmer said that when it comes to applications in the cloud, most of the time the company was winning at the expense of Google. That’s specifically on the application side of things. “Applications are on the leading edge… Customers are far more mature in accepting apps in the cloud,” Ballmer said.
As for the cloud platform play, Ballmer said that it’s still early. Despite a big jump ahead by Amazon’s cloud-based solutions, the Microsoft CEO said there would still continue to be private and public cloud offerings for some time to come, and that Microsoft could offer a solution there.