Some say desperate times call for desperate measures. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sees opportunity everywhere, and earlier this week he called for a revamping of the nation's healthcare system and noted that information technology could drive the change.

"I think everybody kind of understands that healthcare needs to be reborn and reinvented, and information technology is at the key of what doctors and nurses and other health professionals really do," Ballmer told an audience of  about 1,700 Stanford University students on Wednesday in a talk titled "Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Opportunities in Difficult Times."

Ballmer's talk was part of the school's Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Lecture Series.
 
Ballmer said healthcare is one of several industries that need retooling, including education and energy. In  every instance, Ballmer, who has been at Microsoft for 29 years, said he sees software as the answer to reform.

"You don't even have to be interested in the tech field – software is going to change so many fields," he said. "It will change energy, environmental science – the impact of software will be broadly felt. So I'm a bit of a zealot on that, as a particular expertise, but the chance for entrepreneurship is really, really high."

"People say we have an energy problem, what's the answer?" he asked. "We need better software, whether you believe in oil and gas ... or whether you need better tools to model what can happen with new forms of energy. Software accelerates the process."

Though Ballmer did not mention it in his talk, Microsoft's presence in the healthcare field has grown in recent years with the addition of the HealthVault personal health record platform and Amalga data streamlining software, which pulls information from disparate systems.

"The number of opportunities to create brilliant, genius, amazing ideas, the number of interesting things that we see people doing, it continues to be stunning," Ballmer said. "So there's not going to be any shortage of real possibilities. And so the question is, will you have the patience, and the tenacity, and the interest to really start something that's important. If you've got the right idea, you will get some funding."

Ballmer reminded the crowd that both Microsoft and Apple were started during "a kind of recessionary period." General Electric,  he said, was started right after the great de-leveraging of 1873.

"That was the bubble before the Depression that was just like this one," he said. "So, in a sense, there is opportunity. And there may be more opportunities in the long run even if the kind of entrepreneurial opportunities are less glossy than they might have been in the short run."