Spoiling Google's honeymoon

Is that a long-term threat for Microsoft? People like Google come along and they have this Web development idea and they popularise that notion and people listen?
Developers are not building on some Google thing at this point. The idea that the computing industry can simplify its offerings dramatically by having this server-equals-service approach, and having richer services, absolutely I believe in that, and we need to be at the forefront of that. The idea that management can be more automatic and software updating can be more automatic, state-replication more automatic — there are some big things here that can drive the industry forward. They are very complex, because we have to make things very reliable and very secure if you are going to do this. It's just now that we have the maturity of XML and the Web Services protocols that we can start to do [this].

So Google is not offering development capabilities yet. Of course, I expect they will. But they're not in that game at all today. In fact, they have this slogan that they are going to organise the world's information. Our slogan is that we are going to give people tools to let them organise the world's information. It's a slightly different approach, based on the platform-isation of all of our capabilities and not thinking of ourselves as the organiser.

So that would be the philosophical difference between Microsoft and what Google is up to at this point?
Well, we don't know everything they are up to, but we do know their slogan and we disagree with that.

How does Microsoft want to bring that server-equals-service capability to the market? You have the servers. Do you have the services?
Well, let's go through it. We have Active Directory, which we are making a lot richer. There's a lot of talk about that here. And we have Passport. So we're making those very symmetric and having this federation capability be central to the architecture those things follow. We have email where we have Hotmail and Exchange. We'll have hosted Exchange from some of the telcos, too. In terms of Web sites, we have some people doing hosted SharePoint now, we have Spaces, which is a low-end version of that. We'll bring those together. So our services have started out as very inexpensive but not feature-rich. Our servers are very feature rich. So as we bring these things together, we give you the richness and also the choice of having it as server or as a service. And that is a very big deal to us. The place we are strongest in this today is in instant messenger, where the MSN Messenger is the service, and Live Communications Server is the server. So those things are very symmetrical.

So why services now? That idea has been around for a while. There have been some projects within Microsoft to offer Office-like capabilities that didn't actually make it to market. So what has happened to make this a reality?
The fact that Windows monitors when people are having crashes and problems and we get reports, that's been there for three years. Software is becoming...

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