Ballmer on Bing's holy grail: “almost like our own little private copy of the Internet”

As part of his official duties at the opening ceremony of the Imagine Cup 2011 world finals, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was expected to talk Microsoft products and platforms. And talk he did. But among broad comments on diverse topics including Windows 8, Xbox and the move to the cloud, Ballmer seemed most passionate addressing the crowd about the browser.

Here's what he had to say about Bing (which he at one point described as “almost like our own little private copy of the Internet”) and the current evolution of today's browser into progressively refined human tools:

“Bing is a service that is probably amongst the things I'm most excited about at Microsoft, most excited. When I say that to our shareholders, and they go look at our financial reports, and they notice that we lose a lot of money, they asked me, 'Why are you so excited?' Because there's a lot in Bing that I think represents the future of information technology.


“The real holy grail of what we all need to do is transform these machines so they understand you and what you mean. You ought to be able to say to your computer, verbally, type it, I don't care, 'Get me ready for my trip to the Imagine Cup.' That ought to mean something to these systems. It means nothing today.

“I'll give you another one that's even funnier. If you go to a search engine today and you say, 'Print my boarding pass on Southwest,' you'll get nothing back but chaos. The truth of the matter is, computers, search engines, nothing really understands verbs today. We only understand nouns. And yet, most of us as human beings want to command these systems to do something for us. And the core technology we're developing to understand and try to simulate the world of users and what they're interested in, and how they want to get it done is all being done in Bing.”

The writer travelled to the Imagine Cup world finals as a guest of Microsoft.