The numbers show how serious Ballmer is: Microsoft's Office desktop franchise piles up profits faster than even Google 's online advertising money machine.
The combination of advertising-supported content and machine learning creates the potential for the kind of highly targetable environment that marketers have been dreaming of.
There is fundamental difference between the attachment of cookies to track where a machine has been in support of targeted advertising and systems that gain access to the personal information on the machine.
Whether his finely crafted electoral machine can overcome Americans' ambivalence about their president and withstand the advertising bludgeoning Mr Obama is about to receive is another question.
Such groups contend that internet advertising is a fair exchange, but the targeting of advertisement based on the browsing pattern of a machine is too much.