Global CIO: What Is Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's #1 Competitive Statistic?Global CIO: What Is Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's #1 Competitive Statistic?

"Balanced investment, particularly with the economy going loopty-loop—I still don't know where it's going," Ballmer said. "After this morning's panel, probably my worst fears were confirmed, but, nonetheless, wherever the economy is going to go, the need to kind of think in a balanced way about an investment, particularly in a tech company, is hugely important.

"We spend about $9.5 billion in R&D. . . . There is absolutely no way to assess payback on the bulk of that in under about three years. Should we be doing a lot more? Should we be doing less? You know, you go to see your analyst, your favorite analyst always has a point of view on exactly what the model should be, and blah, blah, blah, and the truth is, it's about balance. "

And then he discussed the need to balance ROI-related aggressiveness with patience in evaluating those investments over time—and I think this is a huge factor behind Microsoft's ability to do well in those all-important recruiting wars:

"But making the balanced investment, particularly when things get tough, when a lot of what you're investing in has no immediate term even evaluation metric, let alone return, I mean, is this R&D project really going to matter?" Ballmer asked the audience. "How do you judge that?

"Answer: by the sales it generates in about five years. But being smart, being balanced, thinking about those things and being able to defend to your employees, your shareholders, whoever, hey, I'm really investing enough, and sometimes I think more often than not we wind up defending all of us, are we investing too much, in fact, in our futures. How much patience are you supposed to show?

"Patience is a virtue here. You keep investing, you just invest, you get it right. If you don't get it right, dust yourself off, you get kind of a new cast of characters if you need to, new talent, and you keep coming to find the unique inspiration. And, I think, there was a theme around patience. And yet, at the same time, if you stop and think about it, you don't want patience ever to be an excuse for lack of performance. There are things you'll actually do that are just flat-out bad. We've done some of those. And at some point you've got to be willing to adjust also accordingly. This is one that we've spent a long time on."

(You can see the entire transcript of Ballmer's remarks here.)

This sounds like a guy who's not only "done some of those" things that turned out to be "just flat-out bad" but also learned from those errors—who understands the need to balance an overarching emphasis on revenue and growth with a longer-term view toward innovation and creativity and new markets and products and customers and capabilities.

So if you were a hot-shot college grad who wanted to work on huge and thorny problems and create the greatest new things, it might not be such a stretch to think about working at the company with—by far—the largest R&D budget of any tech company.

I'm going to ask the folks at Microsoft if they can share any further details on the college-recruitment competition because Ballmer makes a great point when he says it is his top-priority market-share stat each year: if the best minds of today are coming your way three times out of four, then there's a good chance your company's going to be producing the best products of tomorrow.

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