What It's Meant to Microsoft

For Microsoft, as a software company we have had to deal with a dramatic expansion in the requirements of our product line. We've always been in the business of selling people platforms that have tools and technology to build products. In the past those things have primarily been personal computers. We also have sold experiences in the form of application programs, so when people buy Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint® as Microsoft Office, they're living an experience in those programs that allows them to communicate or write documents. But the world is expanding quite a bit. The applications are becoming more diverse, and they're spreading out to cover all these other new devices, like Pocket PCs. As the applications become more sophisticated, we need the middleware environments of back-end servers and browsing technologies to allow people to build these experiences on top of platforms. And, as we move into other devices that are not all of the same level of capability, we have to take subsets of the technology—for example, the media technologies—and allow them to be put into many different devices.
The Internet has created another radical change. There are service components of these experiences and, in the future, the platforms themselves that the company is going to sell. For us it's a very important change, and we've learned a lot about this in the last few years. For example, we have the Microsoft Money application, which people use to balance their checkbooks at home. But through MSN™, Microsoft MoneyCentral®, and Microsoft Investor, we've realized that people want a linkage between the application that they use to manage their personal finances and the online services that allow them to pay bills or manage their portfolio in real time.
We've also learned, for example, with Microsoft WebTV® that it's important to have platform technologies that have service components, too. Why? To eliminate the complexity of managing the software. That's a very vibrant environment in all these emerging technologies. You want platforms that can be self-organizing, self-maintaining, self-healing.