"In the Google case, what's fascinating to me is that although you can characterize Google as a search compete, there are two very significant things that happened at Microsoft [as a result]. One was the recognition of advertising as an economic engine," Ozzie said. "And the other was services-based infrastructure. Once the realization was made by different groups that every product would have a services component, you go back to the company's platform roots and figure out what kind of platform treats the services layer as a system."

fascinating stuff...