CIO Steve Ballmer Interview: The Director’s Cut

At the risk of being accused of milking an old cow very dry indeed, Microsoft seems to have posted up a rather beautiful, new(ish) version of the video of my interview with Steve Ballmer from back in October.

This was the ground-breaking confrontation — nay, gladiatorial combat — that may well have given the makers of Frost/Nixon their best ideas, had they not been wrapping up the production at about the same time.

Anyhow, this was the meeting that gave the world news about Microsoft plans to put Zune on other devices and to build datacentres for cloud computing, and saw Ballmer admitting to things Microsoft might have done better on Vista. More importantly, it saw the great man screaming ‘IT pros’ repeatedly, denying the death of Jerry Seinfeld, and looking a bit like he was going to hit me at one point.

He also good-humouredly discusses Apple, Google, VMware and regulators so that should get the search engines interested, even if Britney Spears, Rihanna, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lindsay Lohan never once entered the conversation.

So watch it, burn it, rip it and You Tube it, then add laudatory comments about the Geordie interviewer with eyebrows that won’t stop moving. If you’re pushed for time just cancel everything else and tell the baby to stop crying — or jump to 14 minutes in because the last two minutes are the best bits. And I should know; I’ve watched it 37 times.