Mary Jo Foley has finally gotten an interview with Steve Ballmer (after many, many years!) after he announced his retirement from Microsoft. Some great questions in there – Regrets, successor, plans for the future.

Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here (includes from from lead Microsoft board member John Thompson).

Ballmer: I’m proud of being I would say a significant part even of the birth of intelligent personal computing, the notion that people use computing technologies, whether that’s phones, PCs. I mean, we kind of birthed that over the course of the ’80s and the ’90s, and that’s had such an unbelievable impact on people’s lives. I would say a billion plus people and now more with phones, even if they’re not all our phones, I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished there.