That leaked Microsoft memo

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From Bill Gates to his troops. Once more into the breach etc… Dave Winer’s Blog was one of the sites carrying it today. Key passage reads:

The broad and rich foundation of the internet will unleash a “services wave” of applications and experiences available instantly over the internet to millions of users. Advertising has emerged as a powerful new means by which to directly and indirectly fund the creation and delivery of software and services along with subscriptions and license fees. Services designed to scale to tens or hundreds of millions will dramatically change the nature and cost of solutions deliverable to enterprises or small businesses.

We will build our strategies around Internet services and we will provide a broad set of service APIs and use them in all of our key applications.

This coming “services wave” will be very disruptive. We have competitors who will seize on these approaches and challenge us – still, the opportunity for us to lead is very clear. More than any other company, we have the vision, assets, experience, and aspirations to deliver experiences and solutions across the entire range of digital workstyle & digital lifestyle scenarios, and to do so at scale, reaching users, developers and businesses across all markets.

But in order to execute on this opportunity, as we’ve done before we must act quickly and decisively. This next generation of the internet is being shaped by its “grassroots” adoption and popularization model, and the cost-effective “seamless experiences” delivered through the intentional fusion of services, software and sometimes hardware. We must reflect upon what and for whom we are building, how best to deliver new functionality given the internet services model, what kind of a platform in this new context might enable partners to build great profitable businesses, and how our applications might be reshaped to create service-enabled experiences uniquely compelling to both users and businesses alike.

Steve and I recently expanded Ray Ozzie’s role as CTO to include leading our services strategy across all three divisions. We did this because we believe our services challenges and opportunities will impact most everything we do. Ray has long demonstrated his passion for software, and through his work at Groove he also came to realize the transformative potential for combining software and services. I’ve attached a memo from Ray which I feel sure we will look back on as being as critical as The Internet Tidal Wave memo was when it came out. Ray outlines the great things we and our partners can do using the Internet Services approach.

The next sea change is upon us. We must recognize this change as an opportunity to take our offerings to the next level, compete in a manner commensurate with our industry responsibilities, and utilize our assets and our broad reach to reshape our business for the benefit of the users of our products, our customers, our partners and ourselves.

Pitfalls of using Microsoft Word

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From today’s New York Times…

The United Nations issued a long-awaited report on Syria’s suspected involvement in the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. It was a damning report for Syria by any standard, but recipients of a version of the report that went out on Oct. 20 were able to track the editing changes, which included the deletion of names of officials allegedly involved in the plot, including the Syrian president’s brother and brother-in-law.

A similar gaffe embarrassed the network software company SCO Group in 2004, when it filed suit against DaimlerChrysler for violations of their software agreement. A carelessly distributed Microsoft Word version of the suit revealed, among other things, that the company had spent a good deal of time aiming the suit at Bank of America instead. “It just sort of made it look like they were looking for the easiest target,” Mr. Kennedy said.

At about the same time, California’s attorney general, Bill Lockyer, floated a letter calling peer-to-peer file-sharing software – long the bane of the entertainment industry’s interests – “a dangerous product.” But a peek at the document’s properties revealed that someone dubbed “stevensonv” had a hand in its creation.

Vans Stevenson, a senior vice president with the Motion Picture Association of America, said later that he had offered input on the document but had not written it.

“California AG Plays Sock Puppet to the MPAA,” was one blogger’s response.

The issue increasingly nags at the legal system, as lawyers become aware of the advantages of requesting discovery of the metadata buried in word-processed documents (or debate the ethics of scrubbing the metadata from a file before turning it over to the other side).

This is an old story. The most celebrated case of the pitfalls of using Word came in February 2003, when Tony Blair’s office published the infamous ‘dossier’ about Saddam Hussein’s alleged armory in Word format. (Much of it turned out to be plagiarised from a research student’s article in the journal Middle East Review of International Affairs entitled “Iraq’s Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis”.) Richard M. Smith conducted a terrific analysis of the Downing Street document’s metadata and identified the people who had authored and revised it. As a result, the UK government has largely abandoned Microsoft Word for documents that become public and now tends to circulate them in pdf format. However, my experience is that most companies continue blithely to reveal the origins of, and revisions to, their internal documents!

If you must use Word, be careful to turn off ‘Track Changes’, save the document as an rtf file and then convert it to pdf before letting it out into the world.

57% of US teenage Net users create, remix or share content online

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From the latest Pew Internet and American Life survey…

WASHINGTON, November 2, 2005- American teenagers today are utilizing the interactive capabilities of the internet as they create and share their own media creations. Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations.

Microsoft ponders cannibalism

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This morning’s Observer column on Redmond’s half-assed foray into web services.

Some years ago Harvard academic Clayton Christensen wrote a riveting book entitled The Innovator’s Dilemma, which explored the question of why large, successful companies cannot cope with disruptive technologies. In it he shows that even well-managed firms with established products miss the next big wave in their industries unless their leaders know when to abandon their traditional business practices.

The first chapter in Professor Christensen’s book is entitled ‘How can great firms fail?’ Watching Gates & Co fudging the issue of web services on Tuesday suggested a simple answer: easily.

Patent madness

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Now you really couldn’t make this up. Some genius has filed United States Patent Application to protect the “Process of relaying a story having a unique plot”. The Abstract reads:

A process of relaying a story having a timeline and a unique plot involving characters comprises: indicating a character’s desire at a first time in the timeline for at least one of the following: a) to remain asleep or unconscious until a particular event occurs; and b) to forget or be substantially unable to recall substantially all events during the time period from the first time until a particular event occurs; indicating the character’s substantial inability at a time after the occurrence of the particular event to recall substantially all events during the time period from the first time to the occurrence of the particular event; and indicating that during the time period the character was an active participant in a plurality of events.

[Link via BoingBoing.]

An 8-megapixel phonecam?

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Yep. According to MobileMag,

Today [Thursday, November 3] Samsung Electronics unveiled the world’s first 8.0 megapixel camera phone, the WCDMA SPH-V8200. Ki-Tae Lee, President of Samsung’s Telecommunications Network was the first to demonstrate the Samsung SPH-8200 model.

Saeva Indignatio

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Fine example of savage indignation in the current issue of The Economist. Excerpt from a rant, er, Leader on the importance of free trade:

In Washington, DC, home of a fabled “consensus” about poor countries’ economic policies, a bill before Congress devised by one of New York’s senators, Charles Schumer, threatens a 27.5% tariff on imports from China if that country does not revalue its currency by an equivalent amount. In Mr Schumer’s view, presumably, far too many Chinese peasants are escaping poverty. On November 4th George Bush will escape the febrile atmosphere along Pennsylvania Avenue by visiting Argentina to attend the 34-country Summit of the Americas. There he will be greeted by a rally against “imperialism”, by which is meant him personally, the Iraq war and the Free Trade Area of the Americas which he espouses. Among the hoped-for 50,000 demonstrators will be Diego Maradona, who as a footballer became rich through the game’s global market and as a cocaine-addict was dependent on barrier-busting international trade; and naturally his fellow-summiteer, Hugo Chávez, who is using trade in high-priced oil to finance his “21st-century socialism” in Venezuela.

I like that, er, crack about Maradona.