THERE'S NO RECESSION, IT'S A RESET FOR THE ECONOMY: STEVE BALLMER

Source: The Economic Times

There's little exaggeration in calling Steve Ballmer, along with the iconic Bill Gates, one of the creaters of the modern IT industry. Ballmer, who has been the company's CEO since January 2000, now has the daunting task of conquering new frontiers such as the markets for search and the software, which runs mobile phones. Having missed out on acquiring Yahoo for competing better with search rival Google, Microsoft is now preparing to enhance its Internet search offerings by exploring joint innovation with Yahoo, and investing more in developing newer features for wooing Google users and advertisers.

In an interview, Ballmer says his company will leverage engineering talent available in countries such as India in order to fuel the company's growth.

When do you see the recession ending'

Well I actually don't think we are in a recession ' I don't use that word and I say it's a reset. Recession some times implies going down, and coming up. I think this is a situation where the economy got to an unsustainable level based upon too high a level of borrowing, particularly by business and private individuals, and it's sort of like all of that air has to come out and it takes a while. And the government in some sense does not want it to come up too fast because there is too much societal pain if it all comes out. So, this stimulus in some sense is designed to let air out more slowly. Instead of being over quickly, it may take longer to get over, but it'll be less painful, which I respect. So I don't know if it will be fully reset for another year, two years. At that point, we will get that GDP growth. GDP growth comes from four sources ' population growth, productivity, innovation and debt. Too much of economic growth in the last 10 or 15 years has been from debt. Once we reset, I think the only sources of GDP growth will be productivity and innovation, and some from population.

Just in the US before this reset, private debt owned by businesses and consumers was 300 percent of GDP, it was 150 percent before the Depression in 1929. Financial markets are more sophisticated now, but you can argue that we have about one GDP worth of excess money floating around that needs to come out of the system.

Which sectors do you see rebounding earlier'

Things which are more discretionary and have a greater price need to rebound the most. If you take a look at fast moving consumer goods, those have not been hit much. It's the expensive and discretionary spend that has been hit more. On the business side, among things most hit are overall employment levels and capital spend. But the way things work in most developed markets, IT accounts for almost half of the capital spend. You think about capital spend in banks, telecom ' it's all about IT. IT spend will come back. I think employment will take longer to come back because people are faster to shed employees than they are to bring them back.

What are your thoughts about H1B restrictions being imposed by the US'

The US has benefited tremendously by having talented people wanting to move there ' I think that's been an asset to the US compared to any other country. The US has been a net importer, and not a net ex-porter, of talent; very few countries can say they are net importers of talent. The US education system teaches many people (who are not US citizens) and if they want to stay and work in the US, I think it's a good thing. At Microsoft, we are going to compete for the best and the brightest globally. If the US government allows us we will have those people work in the United States and if the government does not allow us, we are prepared to have those people work for us elsewhere. Whether it's here in India, or China. We opened a development lab in Vancouver, Canada because we could not get visas for everybody, and the Canadians were willing to give visas.

The key for us is to have the best talent. 55 percent of the world's computer science graduates now come from India and China, while 20 percent or 25 percent are US citizens. If you want the best and the brightest you can't re-strict yourself to 20-25 percent of the pool. We are going to continue to try and get visas for people, but we are going to hire the best and employ them at some place, one way or the other.

What about President Barack Obama's plans to tax overseas earnings of American companies in order to create more local jobs'

First of all, there is no real detailed tax proposal, so it's premature to have a detailed point of view. At the end of the day, the government can raise taxes. The US already has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, and part of the current tax regime in the US is de-signed to help US companies be competitive in countries outside the US which have lower tax rates. So, I think US government is going to be thoughtful about that because there are unintended consequences ' will their actions create jobs in the US, or will they tend to drive even more jobs out of the US' In general, business is saying this is not a good thing. My initial reaction is probably like most of the other businesses, (but) I reserve judgement until I see the specifics.

Also, the tax issue is not linked to protectionism. Right now, the US government has said, 'we are going to respect the jurisdictions outside, as long as you do not bring money to the US.' The discussion is very complicated, and until it's fleshed through, it would be difficult to comment. But it's not really protectionism as much as it is about try-ing to decide the jurisdiction; and it would actually give us incentives in some cases to move jobs out of the US, which I don't think is the intent of the proposal.

Has Microsoft missed out on search innovation' You did try to create a stronger rival by attempting to acquire Yahoo, but that did not materialise'

Google has done a great job ' they have built a great business, they are dominant, regulators can decide what that means. The question is: Will they face any competition, and will the search market be an area of high or low innovation' The level of innovation in any category is high when there is competition. We have competition from this funny thing called Linux, which does not even require it to be successful. We have the best and the worst of competition ' we have a competitor that's going to keep competing whether it's successful or not because it does not require financial resources, it's keeping our prices down.

So are there innovations to be done in search, and the answer is clearly yes. I can't speak for Indian languages, but in English, the average search query is 2.2 words because people have learnt that if you type longer queries, you get worse answers. Is there an opportunity for innovation here' I think so. Almost half of all queries never answer somebody's questions ' so 50 percent of the time you don't get what you are looking for ' that's interesting. The material that people are looking for on the Internet gets broader every day, so the opportunity to be dynamic is quite large. We also think there is a lot of opportunity to invent in business models. Google did a great job of inventing a business model, but is it always going to stay the same'