Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is on stage right now at the company’s Financial Analyst Meeting, and he opened with the chart above, comparing Microsoft to other tech giants — including Apple, Google and Amazon — on key financial metrics dating back as far as ten years, which happens to be the bulk of his tenure as CEO.
“We have been very successful,” he said. “We make a ton of money. We’re very proud of that.”
He went on to acknowledge that Windows in particular has been struggling, amid the transition to new forms of computing, but he said Microsoft believes it will continue to see growth, led by devices and enterprise services.
Later in the talk, he talked about the challenges of having a full-fledged version of Microsoft Office on iPad. “Doing authoring correctly on other people’s platforms without a keyboard and a mouse, it’s tough enough to do it where we do have a Surface and a keyboard,” he said.
At the same time, he added, “We’re building the things that you would have us build. … We have surprisingly less religion than you would think we have.”
Here’s another chart that Ballmer showed toward the end of the talk, making a case for the company’s future, and saying its breadth puts it in a unique position to “shoot the moon” compared with its major competitors.
