Ballmer Gets Political
Steve Ballmer Microsoft’s chief executive recently gave a speech to the U.S. House of Representatives Democratic Caucus earlier this month to talk about Microsoft, innovation and of course the economy.
Steve began his speech by telling the House that he was not an economist before giving his personal insight as to why America is going through the worse recession since the Great Depression. Mr. Ballmer talked about how he believes the private sector has borrowed too much money and how we as Americans have become accustom to spending outside of our means.
In order to get back on track Mr. Ballmer stated three key initiatives that need to happen:
- The economy must be de-leveraged. Private debt as a percentage of GDP has to be reduced
- Confidence must be restored in the financial markets
- America really has to return to growth that’s built on innovation and productivity, rather than leverage and private debt
To keep Microsoft competitive Ballmer decided to go back and research companies from the Depression era and learn from their trials and tribulations. What he discovered is that you must continue to be innovative and invest in R&D. He goes on to say that during these trying times it’s important to recognize that cutting costs will only do so much. Companies today must have a plan in place in order to succeed. On January 22, Microsoft announced they would cut 5,000 jobs across marketing, finance, HR, R&D and other divisions. However, what wasn’t made public or rather what didn’t receive much attention is the fact that Microsoft also plans to create two to three thousand jobs and will continue to invest $9 billion a year in R&D.
Innovation is the key to the success of the United States Ballmer believes. We have already begun to witness this through various technologies such as speech recognition where people will interact with technology the way we do with each other. But how do we get there? Here is what Steve Ballmer proposes:
- The federal government needs to invest in human capital and in the citizens of our country
- Greater government investment in our nations science and technology infrastructure
Science and technology was extremely central in the U.S. becoming a world leader. To stay ahead of the rest we must now invest in green technology, alternative energy, bioengineering, parallel computing and quantum computing. And this first starts with the government investments in basic research through our educational system.
What’s important to remember is that this is not the first recession the United States has had to face. We experienced this in 1837, ’73, and 1929 and now in 2008 and the one thing that pulled us through time and again is our people and our ability to pull together through the bad times.
