InformationWeek: Is that something that you'd say that SharePoint 2010 can let customers do that they couldn't do today with competing tools for building Web sites?

Steve Ballmer: Well, you can do anything with anything, the truth is. The question is: how much work is it? Anybody can create an environment for a specific purpose that will allow the same kinds of things to happen. But, what we're trying to do is essentially give the people who build these sites a higher-level set of tools, so they're not sort of recrafting and reinventing the wheel. It's not like you can't write your own blog or wiki infrastructure. It's not that you can't write your own content management infrastructure, and lots of people do. And lots of people have templates that run on top of things like ASP.net and PHP and the like.

The question is, can we move that up and provide a little more standardized higher-level infrastructure, that ties in and lets the end user participate, and is done in a very high-quality, finished way for those folks. And we think the answer is yes, and companies like Kraft and Volvo and many others seem to agree with us.

InformationWeek: One complaint that we hear from our readers about SharePoint is the viral growth that sometimes happens without IT oversight. Is Microsoft taking steps in the next version to help IT keep SharePoint sites from getting out of control?

Steve Ballmer: We're moving things along on all dimensions, and certainly helping IT do the job they need to do on information assurance is one of the top priorities, but we're not holding things back from the other audiences either.

InformationWeek: You've said that SharePoint is the missing link between personal productivity and line-of-business apps. Can you clarify that a bit?

Steve Ballmer: Yes, particularly if you had looked at some of the demonstrations that we did today, we're taking information that comes basically right out of a line-of-business app, pumping it into Outlook. Take the following example. The number one frustration I hear from CEOs about IT is they spend a lot of money, yes, but the bigger frustration is, hey, I still can't get answers to my questions.

Getting answers to people's questions is some part end-user interface, it's some part enterprise search, it's some part business intelligence. If somebody says to you, hey, look, I really want to see profitability by customer by year, what they're really saying is, do a search, get access to business data, bring it back, somehow put it in a form where it's usable, pump it into an Excel spreadsheet, and let me look at it. That happens a lot. And so there's a presentation or a portal aspect. There's a BI aspect. There's kind of an Excel aspect. There's a BCS, business connectivity services aspect. So somehow the union of line of business meets Excel meets SharePoint.

InformationWeek: Do you see SharePoint then as sort of being the linchpin for Microsoft in the enterprise going forward?

Steve Ballmer: It will be another important linchpin. I mean, there are certainly things it doesn't do. I'm not going to try to tell you it does everything. But when it comes to end-user collaboration, end-user compositing, and mash-ups, rapid application deployment, information publishing, and content management, I see it as pretty fundamental. If you say, hey, look, when it comes time to writing a policy management application inside an insurance company, it has a role. But things like Windows and SQL Server probably have the bigger role, and SharePoint has a supporting role.

But in a sense, when it comes down to applications, the sort of big muscles for us are Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint, in some high-end application scenarios BizTalk, and then of course the development tools. But that becomes the basket at the server end, and then of course Office with its integration with all of this on the front end; Office in the browser.