“While Office and Windows have been Microsoft’s flagship
products — not to mention its far-and-away largest revenue sources
— for years now, the writing is on the wall. Their days are
numbered, in terms of being Microsoft’s trend-setting
technologies.”
“Every year at its annual financial analyst meeting, Microsoft
tends to drop a few hints regarding where its top executives are
focusing their time and attention. … Analysts seemed to gloss
right over Ballmer’s statement that Microsoft’s consumer
services business hit $1 billion last year, and that the business
is on a 70 percent annual growth tear. (Comparatively, Windows and
Office combined grew 12 percent in fiscal year 2000.) And in
fiscal year 2001, Microsoft is going to invest $150 million in
beefing up further its bCentral site alone.”
“The opportunity I’m most excited about, in some senses, and I
think may still be most foreign to you, is the investment we’re
making and the opportunities we see in small business,” Ballmer
told analyst day-attendees. “And so you’ll see us build out not
only Office productivity services that (small-business vice
president Kathleen Hebert) talked about, customer management,
accounting, invoicing, manufacturing services; and in some sense I
think of the work we’re doing on bCentral as a flagship for
showcase applications for everything that we want to do with the
.Net platform.”