Perhaps unintentionally, the presentation comes off like a political statement, maybe as phrased by a Microsoft shareholder.

In his story, Vance recaps Microsoft's cloud strategy mostly from a consumer perspective, making sure to include Zune, Xbox, SkyDrive, and even the recent Skype acquisition in the mix, although the latter may be somewhat of a stretch. "The fullest expression of Ballmer's ambition is Microsoft's cloud computing strategy," Vance writes. That statement soon appears to be contradicted by a quote from startup analytics firm Kaggle, whose chief scientist says, "When you talk to other entrepreneurs and tell them you're using Microsoft's cloud services, they look at you like you have leprosy."

It's the negative image, and specifically the one attributed to Ballmer himself, that Microsoft is working to escape. If the Businessweek story counts as its latest move in that direction, then that's at least three that could be considered as having backfired. Last November's company shareholders meeting, according to all reports, was less than one hour in length, and cut short the Q&A session while grumbling shareholders waited at the microphone. Then the Monday keynote at CES 2012, said to be Ballmer's and Microsoft's last, was roundly excoriated by critics who expected the CEO to present a bolder, clearer strategy, as opposed to a list of underdeveloped brand names.

Truth of the matter is, compared to the fellow we saw on stage Monday, Microsoft and its customers could use a bit of the old "Monkey Boy" right about now.

If you happened to see the movie Star Trek VI (the last one with the original TV cast) when it premiered in theaters in 1991, perhaps there may have been a moment (or a dozen) when something occurred to you: You didn't have to dislike or even fail to appreciate these actors on-screen to realize, yep, there's a reason why this is - and should be - their last performance in this venue.

For most of the keynote, Ballmer was seated across a patio table from American Idol host Ryan Seacrest, both trying nervously to generate banter like two cars trying to jump start each other in an Alaska snowstorm. It was clear that Seacrest hadn't read much about the material before showing up on stage, as he was constantly searching for the location of his cues. TV people expect their cues to come from teleprompters, at eye level; public speakers look down toward monitors showing PowerPoint slides.

"We have a chance in the next year to really raise our game, our product line, to the next level, across phones, PCs, tablets, TV, the Xbox," opened Ballmer. "And really the heart and soul of that will be our kinda featured attraction tonight, our new Metro user interface."

Not since 1995 has the layout of an operating system been considered the keynote attraction at an electronics conference. Metro is the overall style of layout being applied to new apps for Windows Phone, Windows 8, and now Xbox 360. "I think people will be kind of impressed at how it lights everything up."

Seacrest thought that was a cue for something. It wasn't, so he searched for some sense of direction. Finding none at eye-level, he quickly ad-libbed: "When you said, 'Metro,' you looked at me in a strange way... Is it the jacket, the sweater, or the combination?" Ballmer got the joke, and then feigned laughter, which is about the second most painful thing you can witness Ballmer ever doing.

Even for a company that may yet have some irons in the fire, it was hard to watch this company stretch things out for time. There were truly painful moments, reminiscent of sitting through an infomercial for Time-Life Music, with some '50s legend of the stage now running on fumes, filling an hour reminding you about how excited he was and how great the past used to be.

It's no secret that stage show producers plant folks in the audience to help applaud at the right moments and generate enthusiasm (I've sat next to a few). This year, when the applause came from about eight people in response to the arrival on-stage of the Windows Phone part of the presentation, the groans from the rest of the crowd drowned them out.

Then Seacrest, who truly is a stranger to quiet crowds, tried to jump in and save the day, as though this were a Vegas lounge act and it was bombing. Holding out his hand in their direction as if to invite them to stand, he said, "The design team over here."

"We definitely took a different approach than everybody else," Ballmer then explained, "and I think we've got a unique and beneficial experience. All these phones these days, they all make calls, they connect to the Internet, they e-mail, social networks, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah," he added in what has come to be heralded as Ballmer's typically dismissive attitude toward market categories where his company is not the leader.

"If you take a look at it, the other phones make the sea of icons, the sea of applications, the kind of view of the world. What we've really done with Windows Phone, I think, is have a better way by putting your people, the people who are important to you, whether it's dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions in somebody's case, I might think," the CEO added, trying to hand off to Seacrest. There was a train of thought there that would have been oh, so welcome at CES 2009, when Microsoft had a prototype concept but opted instead to hold those cards close to its chest, and tout Windows Mobile instead.

When Ballmer moved to the topic of Windows 8, the old syndrome continued to rear its ugly head: starting a new train of thought, building a metaphor, and then finding himself descending into a list of things popping into his head that, impulsively, he could not then ignore.

"Of course, things change - that's the essence of this industry," he replied to Seacrest at one point. "In some senses, maybe the only two things that are constant: Number one, things change. And number two, people don't want to compromise on what they have today. They want the best of what they have and the best of what they want. Nobody wanted to give up anything they had on their desktop, for example, when the world moved to notebooks. It's a wonderful thing. The Windows PCs evolved - it was a programming machine, it was a productivity machine, a music machine, a video machine, an Internet machine. But we don't give up anything."

This evening, we saw the first sign of later builds of Windows 8 running on "Intel-inspired" ultrabooks, than the Developer's Preview that premiered last fall in Anaheim. The green background tone of the Metro-style Start menu has been muted to more of a teal, and multiple saved bookmarks in IE10 are now multi-colored. Besides these factors, there was not much noticeable difference.

Easily the most painful moment of the evening came, sadly, from a gospel choir that had been hired to improvise wonderful, joyful sounds based on tweets that were being streamed in over the speakers' monitors below stage. It wasn't painful for the music; the voices were actually good. Some of the tweets they were singing were selected refrains of excitement from viewers looking forward to the upcoming Xbox-related announcements.

And here they were: The arrival of the Metro-style interface for selecting programming choices (which some Xbox players are already doing). This was followed by a preview of a Metro-style programming guide for Verizon FiOS, which will soon also be tailored for Comcast subscribers (who know they'll still have to subscribe to Comcast's HD STBs whether they use Xboxes instead or not).

And a live demonstration of a little girl who was obviously a few years graduated from Sesame Street, using the Kinect tool to toss imaginary coconuts into Grover's cardboard box.

Not all of these are bad things - certainly I would have seriously considered this Kinect app for my daughter had it been made available a decade earlier. It's just that the first rule of public speaking is "Know Your Audience," and this amalgam of software-related events, most of which we've already seen, speaks to a vastly different audience than the one assembled here in Las Vegas. The audience is doing the types of things that Ballmer describes as "blah-blah-blah-blah-blah." There was a disconnect this year, a clear sign that Microsoft has moved one way and CES another. Rather than prolong the agony, perhaps it's best to just say it's time, and move on.

The keynote is scheduled to start at 9 a.m. Pacific/12 p.m. Eastern and you will be able to see our play-by-play account of the event right here, or head over to the conference website for the live video stream.

8:57: Time to silence the phones. About to get started.

9:01: And there is Steve Ballmer. "I'm pumped up to have a chance to be here today." Talking about the virtual PDC events around the world. It's the same technology as the one behind March Madness and the Olympics. "It's an honor and privilege to have you here. We have some exciting things to talk about: Internet Explorer, Windows Phone, Azure."

9:04: Talking about the history of software technology. Smart devices - the cloud allows us to create a new generation of exciting applications. "You will see a range of exciting things people will be doing with Windows."

9:06: Microsoft is driving this with a number of platforms: Windows, phone, Xbox - and on the cloud, with Azure, Windows Live, Xbox live, etc.

"The glue that allows this to come together is HTML5." "Allows a level of independence between the back-end and the front-end."

9:08: "People increasingly think about that as the lingua france to talk about all of these smart devices. At Microsoft, all of this starts with Windows." 240 million Windows 7 licenses sold. "The PC is the most popular smart device on the planet."

9:09: High hopes for tablets that use the touch capabilities that are already in Windows 7.

Internet Explorer

9:10: Internet Explorer: Microsoft's focus on HTML5. How can Microsoft integrate applications and websites on Windows 7? "We try to make the Web feel more like native applications, so developers can focus more on innovation and less on recoding their applications for different platforms."

9:11: "We think the modern Web really gets a chance to take off with HTML5." "Unlocking the full power of the PC and the Web in one seamless exercise."

So far: 10 million downloads on Internet Explorer 9. The most downloaded beta release of IE.

9:13: Dean Hachamovitch from the IE9 team takes the stage. Talking about three things today: advantages of HTML5 on Windows, making your apps work well with Windows 7 and what's coming next for IE9.

9:14: Demo of KEXP site rendering in HTML5. Highly interactive. Using hardware acceleration to make it better. Including video playing in the background. "We are using the whole PC."

9:17: Showing Track Splash - HTML5-powered game. All done in Canvas, running at 60 frames per second.

9:18: Now comparing IE9 with the latest Chrome beta. "You will notice that it runs - but the performance isn't there." "IE accelerates the whole Web. Accelerating only pieces of the browser holds back developers and your sites."

9:19: Demoing the ability to pin sites to the Win7 task bar. Nothing really new here so far.

9:20: Showing how to create jump lists for websites in the task bar.

9:22: IE9 Platform Preview 6 is now available for download. Increased performance and standards support (HTML5 semantic tags, 2D transforms).

Just like the earlier previews, this one does not have a user interface.

Sorry - network went down here for a little bit.

9:28: "Windows Phone 7 is thoroughly modern." Giving away Windows 7 phones to everybody in the audience.

9:29: Clip of Windows Phone 7 advertising.

9:30: "You will see a lot of these ads in the months going forward.

9:31: Scott Guthrie on stage. Over 1,000 apps and games already uploaded to the marketplace.

9:32: Game demos. Bejewled.

9:34: Facebook app. Looking very slick and very Windows Phone 7-like with Pivot controls, live tiles, etc.

9:35: Demoing the photo hub feature that gives users a single place for seeing all of their photos no matter where they are (Facebook, Smugmug).

Kindle app is also coming to Windows Phone 7. Built-in Kindle store right in the app (that's a first among mobile Kindle apps).

9:37: Demo of Intuit app - Taxcaster.

9:38: Developing for Windows Phone 7. Talking about free SDK and tools.

"Let's build an app on stage."

9:40: Still building the app on stage. Looking very easy.

9:42: New OData library shipping for Windows Phone 7 developers shipping today.

9:43: And the network went down again...

9:44: New capabilities coming to the tools: profiling tools to run apps on the device (and not just in the emulator).

09:46: Application profiler gives developers very detailed stats of how the app really performs on the device.

09:48: Wrapping up Windows Phone 7 part. Ballmer takes the stage again.

09:50: Ballmer, of course, is his usual energetic self. Talking about WP7 apps he saw in France earlier this year.

09:49: "We need your best work. We think the tools are great. The phones are great. We will put our muscle behind the marketing." "We've taken a different pivot on how we can put the user at the center of experience."

"Some of the reviews have pointed out a few things we could still add to the phone." Reiterates that everybody in attendance will get a phone and a free registration in the marketplace.

09:53: Switching to Windows Azure. Ballmer: "I hope you will continue to fall in love with Windows Azure."

09:54: Bob Muglia takes the stage. Talking about second PDC in 1992. "People remember that PDC as the Windows NT PDC." "It was a time when it was a dawn of a new era."

09:55: "We see a new age begin now: the age of the cloud"

09:56: IT as a service. But today, talking about "Platform as a service." This (Azure) is where Microsoft will put a majority of its effort.

What makes platforms as a service so different? Today: we worry about the network, the storage, and only then can we worry about the app. Now: developers can worry about the app.

Platform-as-a-service stays updated automatically. No assembly required. Maintained for you. Ready-made services. "You just focus on what makes our business successful."

10:00: Infrastructure today have to be designed to handle the peak load. Now: scale on demand.

10:01: "For years, applications were designed to prevent them from failing." With platform as a service: "We recognize that things will fail." You just spin up a new instance. Failure doesn't matter there."

That's why we are building Windows Azure. First and foremost, it's an operating system in the cloud.

10:03: If you are building a PaaS, you need an operating system.

10:04: "Lots of services to help developers to develop their apps. Build on top of products and services you know very well." SQL Server, etc.

10:06: Windows Azure is more than just taking all these services and running them in a VM.

10:06: Windows Azure is more than just taking all these services and running them in a VM. SQLAzure, for example, is designed very differently from SQLServer. But SQLServer was designed to run on one machine With SQLAzure, you don't have to think about how the database runs on the back-end.

Of course, you can also run these in your own data center.

"We'll make Java a first-class citizen in the cloud. We will make PHP run great on Azure - or Ruby."

"Our job is to get out of the way and letting you design your applications."

Pixar RenderMan on Azure

10:10: Video: Pixar using the cloud for creating its movies. RenderMan in the cloud. Chris Ford from Pixar takes the stage.

10:13: Pixar is not just a movie studio, but has also developed RenderMan for use in its own movies and other studies.

10:14: Why is the cloud important for Pixar and RenderMan? Every frame takes eight hours to render today on one processor. 272 years for one movie. "We are not that patient."

10:15: Render farms for final movies have about 6,000 processors and it still takes very long to render the movie. Not every can afford the expense of a large render farm. Now, with RenderMan on Azure, even small shops can use RenderMan.

10:16: Why did Pixar choose Azure? Scalability: render farm for rent is not a new idea, but in the cloud, you can now scale these up as you need them. Sustainability: We need to ensure that a solution we put in place will be there for a long time. It just works.

10:19: Demo of RenderMan in the cloud. Process: Upload RenderMan files. Tweak number of rendering units you need in order to get the job done as fast as you need. Render (while seeing previews of the rendered frames).

10:23: End of Pixar demo.

Muglia: "Let's talk about how you can move your apps to the cloud." You can now take a server, virtualize it and move it to Azure (Azure Virtual Machine Role). "We believe that the destination for apps is on Windows Azure. But for some, that's not worth the step, so you can now just move your whole server to the cloud."

Mark Russinovich on stage to demo these new features with Microsoft's Channel 9 site as an example.

10:32: Demo continues...

10:35: Current demo shows how Microsoft uses Azure for rendering video for Channel 9 in the cloud.

10:38: Encoder demo continues...

10:40: Team Foundation Server. Brian Harry demoes how Microsoft moved this into the cloud. Today, you have to run Team Foundation Server on premise. Provisioning it in the cloud just takes a few seconds.

Demo of using Team Foundation Server (TFS) for managing code in the cloud and compiling it there as well, as well as some details about how Microsoft moved TFS into the cloud itself.

10:48: End of TFS demo. "This is a great example of what it takes to take an existing application and then bringing it to Azure."

10:51: Don Box and Jonathan Carter take the stage, trying to get the - by now somewhat sleepy - audience "pumped up" as Steve Ballmer would say.

10:54: Talking about implementing Facebook, Windows Live, etc., authentication in Azure apps now.

10:59: Demo continues with example of how to use the newly announced caching service.

11:02: "Before we get kicked off this stage, we will show you another service."

11:05: And Bob Muglia is back. "We want to make it as easy as possible to use these services and build these apps as easy as possible."

11:07: Launching the Windows Azure Marketplace and DataMarket. Available today.

Over 40 data providers available live today (free and paid) in the Windows Azure Marketplace.

11:10: Next Demo: App Fabric Transform demo by James Conard. Things are getting very technical now... Building a distributed cloud app on stage. Advantage: no need to worry about how many resources a given component of the app needs to run.

11:16: Demo about to wrap app. Building the composite app now.

11:19: Bob Muglia back.

Get a list of all of the new Azure services here: www.microsoft.com/news.

"It's all about the app." Recapping the news. "Windows Azure is ready - now we are giving you the tools to get your apps ready."

11:21: And it's a wrap. Thanks for reading everybody!

"The question is," he continued, "will you have the passion and the tenacity and the interest to really start something that's important?"

He also discussed Microsoft, where it's been and where it's going, the future of technology and why 'now' is important to entrepreneurs. The video, embedded below, is well worth watching, particularly given Ballmer's 29 years of first-hand experience with one of the world's most innovative technology companies.

Steve Ballmer's Tips to Entrepreneurs

Look around you

Look around you at the people you know, find good people, those are the people to trust when you start something.

Be patient and work hard

Some things that wind up being really important take more than ten years to become really popular. Ballmer points to Windows, SQL Databases (Oracle), Google. While he admits there are a "few exceptions," for the most part it's about hard work

Don't let others dissuade you

"My parents thought I'd lost my mind to drop out of Stanford Business School to go to a company that makes software," Ballmer said. "My dad said 'what the heck is software' and my mother said 'why the heck would a person need a computer?'"

We've embedded the video of the lecture below; it runs about 58 minutes, the first 25 consist of his talk, the rest is made up of Q&A and it is well worth your time if you're considering inventing something new.

At another meeting in Sydney, Ballmer also announced that Microsoft was definitely not interested in reconsidering an acquisition of Yahoo.

According to the Associated Press, Ballmer clearly stated his disinterest in going back to the negotiating table with Yahoo anytime soon. Just two days ago, Yahoo's CEO Jerry Yang said that he would consider another offer from Microsoft. Ballmer, however, also acknowledged that "some kind of partnership around search" might still be an option.

Microsoft and WebKit

Looking at the video of Ballmer talking about Webkit (he talks about it at about the 38:50 mark), it quickly becomes clear that Microsoft has no interest in supporting WebKit. Ballmer talks about the importance of web standards and how Apple used WebKit for building its own browser. Ballmer also states that he feels confident about Microsoft's ability to develop interesting browser technologies itself.

While it would surely be interesting if Microsoft did indeed use WebKit for its browser, and while it would also make sense on many levels, it seems that we are still a long way off from seeing an open-source based Internet Explorer.