The Future of Microsoft, The Future of Technology...

I want to welcome you to this very, very special occasion. This is actually part of our normal class. Doesn’t this look like a normal class at Stanford? This is MS&E 472, the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Lecture Series. And every single week we bring in really exciting speakers. Normally we're over in Skilling, with about 300 people, but as you can see today we've got about 1700 people in the room. So this lecture series is brought to you every week by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and by BASES, the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students, and it's also brought to us online by the Stanford Center for Professional Development. And one thing you should remember is that if you're ever interested in this and can't come to the class you can always listen to the podcast, or get video clips of it at ecorner.stanford.edu. In fact, I'm going to repeat that, ecorner.stanford.edu, because we're really proud of the collection of video clips and podcasts that we've collected over the last few years. So it is a very special pleasure to introduce Steve Ballmer today. As you all know he is the CEO of Microsoft. And the interesting thing is, as many of you probably know he started out at Harvard University. And down the hall from him in his dorm, who should be there but Bill Gates. So I'd like all of you to look around and look at all of your fellow classmates and imagine which of these folks you're going to be starting the next big thing with. Because what happened is after Steve graduated, he went off to Proctor & Gamble, and then two years later he came back to Stanford. I don't know if you all know that, but he came to Stanford to the business school. And after the first year during the time he would go do a summer internship, he was asked by Bill to go up and check out Microsoft up north in Washington. So he checked it out and decided, and the rest was history. So I want to introduce this fabulous, wonderful leader who's going to sh...