I'm serious: Today I received an email from Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO.

But let me tell the full story: During one of the Q&A sessions at Mix 2008 in Las Vegas Steve invited the audience to send him emails in case he left any questions unanswered. He therefore disclosed his real email address at Microsoft (which is not that much of a secret anyway). Obviously the show's host asked whether his email address does not get filtered or he gets spammed by thousands of daily emails but he made very clear that whenever he responds it's really him. While his inbox is monitored by his secretary - as it is very common in mid- to large size enterprise - and his secretary does wipe out any spam, he stated that right after events like Mix he gets hundreds of emails but it significantly slows down in a week or two after. So he ultimately would have no issue with disclosing his email alias.

Almost two months later I recognized that Steve planned to attend Mix Essentials in Belgium. As I recently "migrated" my dev team from WinForms to WPF I'd anyway planned to attend the conference. Steve had been announced for 17.00 CET. Remembering what he'd said regarding his approachability I dropped him an email the morning of the conference. During his speech in Belgium (which I was able to follow from the first row) he repeated what he'd said before regarding his will to directly speak to customers and partners at any time and added, that he might need 24 hours to respond.

(Steve Ballmer photographed with my iPhone :-) )

And in fact, Friday evening (CET) at 21:43 he send me a brief response. His response - which I do not disclose for several reasons - was directly related to me attending the event so I can be 100% sure that it has not been crafted by a ghost writer of any sort. It must have been written by the man who stood right in front of me and noticed me sitting in the front row. :-)

That said, I must admit that I continue to love and like Microsoft, the company, their products and their new habit of opening up more and more. I have been in contact with many of the great minds at Microsoft before - Scott Guthrie, to name one of them - and they've always been of great help and inspiration. I do like, that even Mr. Ballmer lives up to the promise of being extremely responsive to customers and partners.

I am currently contemplating about my response because I'd really like to continue the dialog. :-)