LOL, 100 million users. (Photo: Wikimedia)

While everyone's busy at the BlackBerry presser (Alicia Keys? Really?), Microsoft also has a big release today: Office 2013. In honor of the occasion, CEO Steve Ballmer sat down with Bloomberg Businessweek for a brief Q&A. Inquiring minds want to know: How's the old workhorse supposed to avoid the glue factory when any modernization has to be balanced with the needs of a billion customers?

As Bloomberg Businessweek puts it, "partly as a result of this, Microsoft is coming to the cloud late and now going up against a company like Dropbox that already has 100 million users." So what does Mr. Ballmer think of that?

Well, you’ve got to remember, 100 million sounds like a pretty small number to me, actually. We’ve got a lot more Office users. And actually if you even want to go to the cloud, we have a lot of Hotmail and SkyDrive users. I’m not beating on Dropbox. They’re a fine little startup and that’s great.

He's also pretty sure Microsoft can grow the Office user base to be greater than a billion people: "That’s sort of the miracle of economic development, isn’t it?"

Last time we checked, miracles weren't the best business plan.