[via TechCrunch]

TechCrunch posted about a really very informative, extensive and dense Fortune’s article – Microsoft’s new brain – about the role of Ray Ozzie by Microsoft, their new strategy, etc.

A must-read, if you would like to apprehend (partly) what is going on in Seattle.

Ray Ozzie by Microsoft

But the chairman and the CEO already had so much confidence in Ozzie – a renowned programmer who had created Lotus Notes, one of software’s biggest triumphs – that he had become Gates’ proxy. Since the retreat, Ozzie’s responsibilities have expanded even further. The white-haired, soft-voiced 50-year-old is spearheading the companywide transformation agreed upon at Robinswood.

“I cannot overstate the importance of what Ray Ozzie has done here,” Gates says. […]

Put simply, Ozzie’s assignment is to Webify everything: To intertwine Microsoft’s entire product line – software for consumers, software for businesses, Xboxes, all of it – with the vast and ever-growing power of the Net.

“Everything we do should have a presence on the Web,” Ozzie says. […]

Ozzie can do what Gates no longer can – not only formulate strategy but also help implement it by working with the troops. People tell stories of the approachable Ozzie having long conversations with low-level programmers by the coffee machine about security strategies or other arcana.

“Ray brings people together in a way others don’t,” says Blake Irving, head of Internet communications products at MSN. “He’s sort of a grand unifier across the company.” […]

But many of the company’s leaders, including Gates, were impressed with the way Ozzie looked at technological challenges.

“Ray really starts with the customer,” says Windows and MSN boss Kevin Johnson. “He looks at things ‘outside in,’ as he says, not technology-out.”

Many executives now concede that Microsoft tended to take the opposite approach – focusing first on the technical possibilities and only later on what customers really wanted.

As a senior executive puts it, “Our customers buy our products in an integrated fashion, but we build them in a siloed fashion.” […]

Ozzie remembers “vigorous disagreement” over business models based on advertising revenue, vs. those based on transaction fees or traditional licensing.

“It’s clear that in the consumer realm, online advertising is this new economic engine,” says Ozzie. “It’s not as obvious how that engine is applied in the enterprise market.”

But the companywide excitement about the potential of online advertising is palpable. MSN’s Blake Irving calculates that annual worldwide advertising spending amounts to about half-a-trillion dollars, vs. total software industry revenue of about $120 billion.

Live Drive vs. GDrive

Though he won’t get very specific, Ozzie says that he is amazed at the amounts Microsoft is spending, and that the cost of building the physical infrastructure for Web services will be a major barrier limiting the number of players in this business.

“The people who could build a viable services infrastructure of scale,” he says, “are companies that have both the will and the capacity to invest staggering amounts of money – staggering amounts.” Think billions, many billions. […]

Microsoft has to move before Google or even Yahoo! offers its own large-scale services for businesses over the Web. Up to now those companies have focused on consumers, but it’s widely believed in Silicon Valley that Google, at least, will soon launch corporate e-mail services to exploit the infrastructure it’s already built for Gmail.

(Google is rumored to have a million servers around the world and, according to a knowledgeable source, is already the top electricity user in at least one large U.S. state. Google would not comment.)

Microsoft is planning to use its server farms to offer anyone huge amounts of online storage of digital data. It even has a name for that future service: Live Drive. With Live Drive, all your information – movies, music, tax information, a high-definition videoconference you had with your grandmother, whatever – could be accessible from anywhere, on any device.

Google apparently has similar plans. An internal memo accidentally posted online in March spoke of company efforts to “store 100 percent of user data” and mentions an unannounced Net-storage system called GDrive.