Microsoft Plan for the Future - All roads lead to the Internet

The company detailed how it was spending heavily on building Internet services into its products, but that any payoff from the effort would not come for a few years. Microsoft executives reporting to analysts Washington 27 July 2006

Microsoft’s size and broad portfolio of products, the executives said, would prove an advantage in competing against Google, the current leader in Internet services. Internet search, according to Microsoft, will increasingly become seamlessly integrated into the Windows desktop operating system, Office productivity software, cellphones powered by Windows.

Microsoft executives acknowledge that as computing increasingly gravitates to the Web and often toward ad-supported services, it creates both a technical and business challenge for a company whose great strength is in personal computer desktop software.

But the Microsoft vision is that Internet services can complement rather than cannibalize the company’s traditional business if they are built into products like Windows.

“Microsoft’s current offerings represent a huge advantage that we can migrate into this services world,” said Ray Ozzie, the chief software architect.