Steve Ballmer talks about the future of software and mobile

Ballmer remains very bullish on search (advertising) and see's mobile as one of the new completely unconquered markets where new software will emerge. Follow up on the dicussion here

Ballmer and Winblad also discussed the mobile market. Ballmer is focused on the smartphone market, where Microsoft software is a major player. 125 million smart phones will be sold this year, he said, and that will grow to a billion in five years. He says proprietary hardware/software stacks (iPhone) will have trouble competing with the more open approaches, such as Microsoft, Android, Symbian, etc. He ads a caveat, however: users won’t trade off usability just to have different hardware choices. The operating systems must work seamlessly across different hardware configurations.