Forget about product roadmaps and internal ship dates. What folks really want to know when it comes to Microsoft is what is going to get the company's stock out of the doldrums. When Fortune recently asked CEO Steve Ballmer that very question, Ballmer's answer left us rather stunned: "We've got companies like AT&T (Research) and Verizon (Research) driving this Internet television stuff very aggressively. If you can get a few bucks a month on a lot of televisions around the world, that's a pretty darn big opportunity. Same thing for Windows Mobile, where we're a negligible player but we have real market traction for the first time," Ballmer said. So now you know: The future is not plastics, it's IPTV. Hmmm…..