On Steve Jobs' contention that this is now a post-PC world: "I think that people are going to be using PCs in greater and greater numbers for years to come." But PCs will look different. They'll evolve. They'll get smaller, get touch, get different interfaces, their insides will change. "The real question is what is a PC? Nothing done on a PC today will get less relevant tomorrow. I think there will exist a general-purpose device that does anything you want, because people don't want multiple devices, or can't afford them. I think the PC as we know it will continue to morph in form factor. So the real question is where do you push?" Addressing Job's truck analogy he says, "Windows machines will not be trucks."

On the Cloud: "There's nothing bad for us in the trend. It's all good. But it's a transition and as such it's a period of tumult. So we need to be smarter and more vigilant. But not because we're moving from a world that's fundamentally good for us to a world that's not. We're moving to a world that's good for us to a world that's potentially even more good for us."

On Apple: Great quarter, same market share. The All Things Digital blog running the conference said "He seems to suggest that the debut of the iPad is a signal that the Mac is going away. PCs running Microsoft software are not." He's expecting Microsoft and Apple will eventually "run into each other" in the market. The iPad is simply a PC with a different form factor and a surge of momentum. To say it's anything more is marketing hype. "The race is on" for whatever comes next.

On Google's operating systems: On the phone Android's a competitor; elsewhere it's unclear it matters. He wonders why Google has two operating systems. Ray Ozzie, who's with Ballmer, says Android is a bet on the past, and Chrome is a bet on the future. "When you install an app you're targeting a device. When you use Chrome, you're looking at a cloud-based future."