Current Word

Wednesday, November 9th, 2005

Microsoft Memos

We will build our strategies around Internet services and we will provide a broad set of service APIs and use them in all of our key applications.

This coming “services wave” will be very disruptive. We have competitors who will seize on these approaches and challenge us – still, the opportunity for us to lead is very clear. More than any other company, we have the vision, assets, experience, and aspirations to deliver experiences and solutions across the entire range of digital workstyle & digital lifestyle scenarios, and to do so at scale, reaching users, developers and businesses across all markets.

But in order to execute on this opportunity, as we’ve done before we must act quickly and decisively. This next generation of the internet is being shaped by its “grassroots” adoption and popularization model, and the cost-effective “seamless experiences” delivered through the intentional fusion of services, software and sometimes hardware. We must reflect upon what and for whom we are building, how best to deliver new functionality given the internet services model, what kind of a platform in this new context might enable partners to build great profitable businesses, and how our applications might be reshaped to create service-enabled experiences uniquely compelling to both users and businesses alike.

- Bill Gates

Ozzie’s Memo is bit more wordy, but I like his three tenants and the emphasis on “seamless” opportunities he outlines. I’m not much into web application development. I’ve done a little server side scripting and found that using tools like Linux and languages like Python are cruel old school hacks. I have faith that my good ol’ Microsoft brethren will facilitate migration of my core skills onto the web, without changing the way I do things. Quality tools, systems, services, interfaces and docs, while also addressing the competitive issues that are critical to our success in this space. And Microsoft will make these experiences seamless across every Microsoft device. Very cool. Combining Microsoft’s far reaching platform space with their existing leadership in web services should create a number of areas of opportunity. Which is quite different from what I perceived was coming five years ago.

The next sea change is upon us. We must recognize this change as an opportunity to take our offerings to the next level, compete in a manner commensurate with our industry responsibilities, and utilize our assets and our broad reach to reshape our business for the benefit of the users of our products, our customers, our partners and ourselves.

Some predictions:

1) We’ll see a completely free, stripped down version of Windows Server before long. Including the basic services needed to run web sites, like IIS, SQL Server.
2) We’ll see a major advertising service initiative oriented toward embedding advertising in applications and web sites that developers will be able to leverage that blows anything available today out of the water.
3) We’ll see major push of Windows Live services, specifically the office and business products over the next couple years. Microsoft is going to attack web based products offered by their competitors in a serious way.