Actually, if you have ever heard Steve Ballmer speak in person, you'll know that he's never unplugged. Today at Microsoft's annual Most Valuable Professional Global Summit in Seattle was no exception... with his customary energy, Chairman Steve came clean to the core group of third-party Microsoft experts and made some admissions and revelations that provide some interesting guidance on the company's operations in a variety of areas.

First, and likely to garner the most interest, Steve finally admitted that Vista is "a work in progress." While this is certainly a conclusion which the company has been gently massaging customers around toward, it wasn't the initial marketing stance at all, and I think one of the things which irritated professionals the most was the bald-faced assertion that Vista was teh awesome while XP was old news, when that clearly wasn't the case for any clear-thinking technical professional.

But that's unimportant at this point for anything other than a certain distant satisfaction. More important is Ballmer's promise that the bloat that came along with Vista isn't going to get any more bloated, and that the time of development for that operating system was excessive and the company will take all necessary steps to avoid similar delay in delivering the next Windows. This supports Mary Jo Foley's recent rebuttal to Forrester's suggestions that company's not wait for Windows 7 at all but instead bite the bullet and upgrade to Vista sooner rather than later. I think Forrester is missing the mark as well, and this is additional evidence that is the case.

Steve also provided some evidence for another pet theory of mine, that the Microsoft "Software + Services" approach is grounded more in the necessity of maneuvering a large legacy code base of enterprise applications toward a SaaS model than in any significant technical reasoning. Responding to a question about hosted Sharepoint's offline features, he mentioned both the difficulty of creating them effectively, and expanded on the company's willingness to provide services to customers in addition to just software. The implication is that the difficulty of creating good hosted Exchange and Sharepoint offerings is holding those services back more than any dedication to the S+S model.

Apart from that, there were an awful lot of questions about the company's recent acquisition of Groove, and some generic "This is your future" sort of story-telling. It is, however, a refreshing break from the pablum produced by the company's marketing department; SteveB is a grand salesman but there is generally something of value even in his spin and the transcript of the speech is worth a read for anyone relying on Microsoft platforms.