Ballmer picks hot new technolgies

Which hot new technologies government contractors should pursue depends on whether the companies want short-term or long-term investments, the CEO of Microsoft said today.

In the next three to five years, voice over IP and mobile devices that can run Internet-connected programs will become prevalent, Steve Ballmer said.

Ballmer shared his comments in Washington, D.C., with the Northern Virginia Technology Council, a local industry group.

Desired technologies will soon replace menus and graphic user interfaces with natural-language interfaces, Ballmer said. “People so much want to speak English to their computer instead of speaking the command language of the computer,” he said.

Those interfaces will initiate complex behavior by the computer — such as automatically collecting all documents, travel information, Web pages for a trip — instead of needing a person to do it, Ballmer said.