Ray Ozzie memo: Microsofts Services strategy

Dave Winer has posted 2 e-mail memos, from Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie, on the next step forward for the company.

Clearly Ray has had time to talk to the product teams, senior management and developers and has finally taken stock of the situation.

Ray Ozzie mentions some key tenents:

1. The power of the advertising-supported economic model.
2. The effectiveness of a new delivery and adoption model.
3. The demand for compelling, integrated user experiences that “just work”.

Fundamentally, Ray's memo is a more than just a call to developers and product teams about service-enabling their assets. Its a an action-plan. Driven by end to end user-driven scenarios, something that Ray is very good at, from these use-cases, he will drive architectural design decisions and map that to current and fututure products/services.

I think this is not a good time for Microsoft, yet you can't but feel that finally they have someone at the top of Microsoft that actually gets it. What Mcirosoft has delivered as Ray has said is a 80% solution. In the post-"Vista/Office12" wave we will see a fantastic level of seamless integration of technology that weve not seen before, his past efforts with Notes and Groove should give us some inclination of the potential.

I have still some doubts though; Microsoft needs to balance Enterprise revenue models with Consumer/advertising revenue models. There needs to be harnomy between product and services -- the old mindset to lock-in services and products just won't cut it.