Bill Gates endorses Ray Ozzie's world-view and call to action for Microsoft. Since Microsoft's products and services are ubiquitous (PC, PDA, XBox, MSN, cash registers, and now perhaps even television) and affect us all, it's probably a good idea to read this and understand how Redmond's thinking is changing. Memo to non-engineer friends: this means you.
We've seen this before, sort of. Microsoft was late to the Internet, but caught up significantly when it bought what became Internet Explorer and famously bundled it at no extra charge with Windows (resulting in the anti-trust dust-up with the DOJ that made for a few nervous moments, especially in Europe).
What's different here is that Microsoft has already tried and failed to "embrace and extend" the world of "web services" (remember Hailstorm?). Turns out there was a trust gap. Google, the poster child for Web 2.0 these days, seems to have gotten that with its "Don't Be Evil" pledge, but it will be interesting to see how that imperative is interpreted, as pressures to hit quarterly earnings cause product managers there to gaze longingly at monetization opportunities associated with all these cool AJAX applications their APIs make possible.
So now that Microsoft gets Web 2.0 and perceives an important threat to its apps business (and aspirations for data-oriented businesses) to complement the threat to its core Windows franchise from Linux, what can we expect from Redmond? In particular, that might be relevant to marketers concerned with the customer experience?
One model for what to expect might come from the Mozilla Firefox project. Firefox as many of you know is the free, open-source browser that has taken the world by storm. What's superficially cool about Firefox is tabbed browsing, but what's really cool is the universe of extensions for Firefox developed by a symbiotic ecosystem of third-party developers. (For example, check out the Stumble Upon extension; perhaps there are domain-specific versions of this that could be provided or at least sponsored by relevant firms. Trying it out led me to this potentially brilliant medium for viral marketing.)
Microsoft, with its huge installed base and developer network has the raw materials to create a similar ecosystem for its core portal products, IE and Outlook (for example, I use the NewsGator plug-in for Outlook to handle my RSS subscriptions). One interesting challenge for Microsoft will be how to catalyze the reactions that will cause a similar explosion in innovation based on Microsoft technologies, while capturing and channeling (at least some of) this heat and light to its bottom line. This may lead away from selling software as software, and perhaps towards more software in support of data-leveraged services, like the one we built with Ning.