Speaking at a financial analysts’ briefing in New York last week, Mr Ballmer said there was a “real movement” among large companies in the emerging economies that would provide renewed growth opportunities for business software growth in the next financial year.
“There's certainly an opportunity to grow the business again in the corporate world in emerging markets on the desktop,” Mr Ballmer said.
“More and more if you go to China, you go to India, the biggest companies all do actually want to be legal.
“As people increasingly list their stocks on the exchanges in those countries, in this country, in others, there's a real movement to legalise in the corporate environment in these emerging countries,” he said.
Mr Ballmer told the analysts that while the industry move to software as a service presented enormous challenges and potential threats to the company, the changes were fundamental and presented at least equal opportunities for growth.
“The evolution of the software business to being a business of software and service is fundamental, and we are investing in that as if it is fundamental,” Mr Ballmer said.
“We will evolve our business models from transactions to in some cases subscription, in some cases hosting, in some cases advertising, in some cases we'll continue on the transaction model, but our business models will evolve with the evolution of our business to have much more of a service component.
“I view this as a huge opportunity for us. People can say, isn't it also a huge threat? Sure, all great transformations have both aspects to them.
“This as fundamentally a very, very good thing, but nonetheless it brings with it a world with new competitors and new challenges,” Mr Ballmer said.
Meanwhile, just three weeks after the launch of the next generation Windows Vista operating system, Mr Ballmer has said the company hopes to develop and release the next major Windows upgrade well inside the five years it took to get Vista to market.
While Microsoft last week issued a statement aimed at quelling speculation about when the company expected to release the next version of Windows.
Mr Ballmer said there were people in the industry still held to the idea that innovation could still be developed by “three guys in a garage”.
“We won't go five years again, I promise, between big Windows releases,” Mr Ballmer said.
“But there are products that are so anchored to the way people work, they're not going to be (developed by) three guys overnight. It simply requires too much testing and too much sort of sophisticated engineering to get there.”
“But we continue to push and push hard on the innovation front, and I'm going to talk about that,” he said.
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