Ballmer Soars into the Server Cloud

Or so Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer emphasized in his keynote during today's Financial Analyst Meeting in Redmond. Steve packed an unusually large amount of looking-forward information into his keynote, which heavily emphasized cloud computing in the enterprise and the importance of succeeding in search and advertising.

As a teaser, I pulled four slides from his PowerPoint presentation that give early sense of his keynote. By the way, Steve was in remarkably good form today.

GOT A TIP OR RUMOR?

I want to call out business intelligence, enterprise search and virtualization as areas to watch in fiscal 2009.

Steve spent some time laying out the areas of focus, which I will look at more closely in a follow-up post.

Microsoft is clearly matching up its server software strategy with the computing cloud.

Could this slide be any clearer explaining why Microsoft is dead set on beating Google in advertising and search?

[Please send your tips or rumors to watchtips at live.com].