Selling Microsoft's integration vision

The dream is: how do we get all of the technology in life to work together.

When you are working at developing this environment, do you get frustrated by the need to support other, competing environments?
Microsoft probably has the broadest footprint. Now it is evolving into the home — there's Media Centre, Tablets, Windows Mobile, Xbox, set-top boxes, IP-TV — and then we are investing in some of the emerging categories like software in your car.

There are other classes of devices that aren't running Windows software, tragically, and we are working on that. But to the degree that there are ways to make those devices part of our constellation you can say we are 60 to 80 percent there.

When one looks at Microsoft Live it looks like on-demand computing?
The real magic is that it will be a combination of client software, peer-to-peer interactions and cloud-based services — it is not any one of those, it is actually the mix of all of them. So when people are talking about on-demand, I don't know whether they are talking about the crazy, IBM approach: "I'm going to host everybody's mainframe and there is nobody in the market who knows how to run a mainframe. If we are going to preserve that business we are going to have to run it ourselves." Then my cable company talks about on-demand, when I can get video on-demand. It's not a super-useful term for me.

You have major upgrades to CRM and to your accounting software coming soon. Are these all being done within the Live environment?
Offices are expanding in three directions. There are offices with client software, which is what people are most familiar with. We've added small business accounting, things like Groove and there are some new client apps that have shown up. We have also added a huge investment in Office server capabilities — in the current generation that is SharePoint, which adds everything from business intelligence to workflow to content management. The third direction is services, like Office Live.

Making all those things work together is the goal. There are integration points with all these things, Office Live, for example, is designed to work with Office small business accounting — you can use Office Live service to share your accounting information with your accountant. So the footprint of what people think of as Office is just going to grow and grow.

Where do you see open source within this, in terms of your customers — some of whom will be using it?
Open source is really a developer phenomenon that speaks to infrastructure. With Windows Live and Office Live we are talking about customer experiences, whether it is a personal set of services for Windows Live or things that are aimed at helping people grow and manage their businesses. I doubt if you talk to users of Office Live that they have any interest in dorking around with source code. This is about customer experience rather than developer experience so it's largely irrelevant.