Hot on the heels if the Live Mesh announcement, the full text of Ray Ozzie’s Live Software plus Services strategy memo is now available. Here’s my advice – read it once. Then walk away…come back a while later and read it again. Ray has a different style that a few commentators over the last week have alluded to – a bit Zen mystery that requires you to make some assumptions and read between the lines at time. He’s also not one for hyperbole in my experience and if you read the Wharton interview I link to below, you’ll hear him pretty much say that.

Jack Schofield has some commentary on the paper that I would largely go along with. He also picks up the point that Ray and his team are very open and standards oriented and whilst many thought Mesh would just be a half baked Groove it’s quite a lot more. Whilst Techcrunch laments the Windows only experience of Live Mesh right now and use that as a simple tool to say “same old Microsoft” they will be proved wrong. The Mac client is coming per the Add Device page on the Live Mesh device ring (below)

 

adddevice

Jack goes on to say

 

Either way, it's going to be interesting to see how the "cloud computing will kill Microsoft" camp will cope with Microsoft becoming a major supplier with an advanced cloud infrastructure, superior PC integration and the ability to undercut it on price.

 

…and this starts to get to the real story here. We could have come out months ago and talked about Live Mesh and related projects but that’s not the Ozzie way. He bides his time and then delivers – or his team does to be more accurate.

If you want to start putting the pieces of the puzzle together, go back to the Financial Analyst Meeting presentation Ray gave back in July 2006. That’s right…way back then he started laying out the story and over the last 24 hours you have seen another piece of it. Let’s review what he said back then:

 

“How can we best accomplish the experience we want taking advantage of the ability of centralized services to enable seamless end-to-end experiences for the user? We know that a centralized service can be a great place to store or cache things so they can be accessed anywhere on the Net, and to organize things and share things with others.”

 

…in developing applications and solutions in this new era, we use an experience-first, service-centric approach—a holistic approach across the Web, the PC, and other devices, an approach that uses the Windows Live services platform to kind of bring it all together.

 

Some years from now, as you look back on this time, this time I've referred to as being a services transformation, I think you'll view it as the beginning of a period where your view of software and servers and services became enmeshed and intertwined

 

I would also strongly suggest a review of the April 2007 Wharton interview with Ray. Here’s one choice quote:

 

“I am not one to believe that suddenly you snap fingers and everything that you do on the PC is doable on the web. You shouldn't just take things [you do on the PC] and put them [on the web]. You should figure out what they're good for [on the web] and what they are good for [on the PC] and weave them together. Based on my experience, I believe that this represents more opportunity than risk.”

Then go look at the 2007 FAM presentation where things start to get even more concrete. Some notable quotes:

 

"The datacenters are of massive scale. There's a number of them. They're built with commodity components, and that's how you get the cost down, and they achieve reliability through redundancy, not the fail-safe nature of any given component within the datacenter. Our expansion continues at this layer around the world."

“Microsoft's own services in the cloud, in our datacenters, where our services will likely be much more horizontal in nature and where we'll take a platform approach to it and offer the lowest, lowest possible cost that we can.”

“The first one is that the services transformation, this transformation from software to software plus services, is a very, very big deal for our company. It'll be a very critical aspect of all of our offerings over the next few years. We're building a platform to support our own apps and solutions, and to support our partners' applications and solutions, and to support enterprise solutions and enterprise infrastructure. We are the only company in the industry that has the breadth of reach from consumer to enterprises to understand and deliver and to take full advantage of the services opportunity in all of these markets. I believe we're the only company with the platform DNA that's necessarily to viably deliver this highly leveragable platform approach to services. And we're certainly one of the few companies that has the financial capacity to capitalize on this sea change, this services transformation.”

 

The last quote there echoes the closing sentiments of this new memo and brings things full circle. For now :)

As you can probably tell, I love watching this new Microsoft emerge. I guarantee there will be mistakes and mis-steps along the was but I suspect fewer than before. You’re witnessing a more open Microsoft and whilst changes of this magnitude take time I think I’ll look back on this era and consider myself very fortunate to be able to see some of this up close. For the parts I can’t I’m out here with you, decoding Ray :)