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His face looks like the 3D movie version of some happy-go-lucky cartoon character, so for some, concocting a Charles Addams-like killer caption for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is irresistible. On Friday the 13th, of all days, the Bloomberg Businessweek cover (for those of you who still read magazines) will feature Ballmer's face along with its own idea of a "Caption This" contest entry, literally plastered in pink all over him.

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

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.

There's a good possibility that Microsoft may have made a bigger splash by exiting the keynote address and booth presence at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show than it made by being there in the four years leading up to 2012. If CES were an accurate barometer of consumer sentiment, then today we would all be snug in our vibrating chairs with our femtocell-enhanced home wireless phones (with built-in universal remotes), watching HD DVD movies with "TV Everywhere" live interactive background feeds on our plasma screens through our VIIV media PCs, and with mobile TVs in our shirt pockets feeding us live sports scores via AOL's colossal media empire.

In 2006, the spotlight of the Bill Gates Microsoft keynote was the music distribution service of the future. Called "Urge," it was a joint venture between Microsoft and MTV, at a time when the "M" in the latter's name stood for "music." Users would pay $9.95 per month to stream music videos directly to Windows Media Player 11, and receive songs in a format that was not portable to devices like iPods. That was followed up by the phone service of the future, called "Windows Live Call," which would be integrated into digital HDTVs by way of a partnership deal with DirecTV and Verizon.

There are some products that appear to have been doomed to circumstance since birth - that despite the most ambitious goals, the grandest intentions, and often the wildest strokes of luck, still manage to end up on the wrong side of public perception. No more prominent example exists in the history of software than Microsoft Silverlight, a textbook case of a platform that was never, for one moment, given the benefit of a doubt.

It did not help that its original title, circa 2006, was "Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere" (WPF/E), which sounded like the catch-phrase for a neoconservative protest movement. And it really didn't help that its producer had attained a reputation for defining the Web by default, building less-than-ideal browsers and technologies and broadcasting them into ubiquitousness by tying them to Windows.

In a closing word to developers at the Build 2011 conference in Anaheim late this morning, a noticeably slimmer Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer expressed a more subdued level of enthusiasm than we've seen from him in the past - still upbeat, but more measured, perhaps more quietly confident. In this more enlightened state, he expressed a degree of candidness about the initial reaction to the Windows 8 developer preview.

Microsoft is holding its Professional Developer Conference (PDC) on its Redmond, WA campus this week. The event kicks off with a two-hour keynote hosted by the company's CEO Steve Ballmer and Bob Muglia, Microsoft's president of its server and tools division. Microsoft generally holds these events when it wants to tell its developer community about major platform developments, so we expect to hear a lot about Microsoft's new mobile platform Windows Phone 7 and its cloud computing initiatives. We have also heard some rumors that we could hear something about Windows 8 today.

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.

We know Steve Ballmer is an enthusiastic guy. And that he has just a tad bit of excitement about Microsoft.

We give Ballmer credit for his drive to make cloud computing core to Microsoft's future.

But in one moment, Steve Ballmer did what we never thought possible. Along with a man in blue shorts and red socks, he had us cringing about the World Cup and the cloud.

At the end of his keynote on Monday at Sharepoint 2009, an interviewer asked Steve Ballmer about social computing. Ballmer recounted a story about a friend of his, a CEO for a Fortune 50 company. He said the guy is adamant in his opposition to social computing in his company. But if he had assurances that corporate data would be safe, then it might be a different story.

"Now is the time for people who care, who want to invent, who have skills in specific scientific and information technology areas, to get out there and add to the productivity of the economy," Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft said during the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture at Stanford University last week.

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

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer is always good for a controversial statement. His latest came during a Q&A session after a speech to developers in Sydney, Australia. After a question about the relevance of Internet Explorer, Ballmer commented that Microsoft "may take a look" at using the open source browser engine WebKit for Internet Explorer. While this was surely just a throw-away comment, the tech blogosphere immediately jumped on it.

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