Before I go into anymore detail about “The Platform” itself I thought I’d cut to the chase and look at an example of a customer following this philosophy in the real world. I spend most of my time with enterprise customers and a lot of that time talking...

I think a platform discussion is a reasonable place to start looking at the overall value of Microsoft. I have to start by saying I really don’t like the term “platform”, it’s used to describe all manner of software systems and hence means different things...

In the 5 short years I’ve been here at Microsoft the company has evolved an enormous amount. Back in 1999, Windows NT 4 and BackOffice formed the bulk of our product offering for business customers. Today things are very different in terms of products...