Scoble wouldn't tell me squat about this when I grilled him yesterday, but he sounded as excited as if someone had given him a free lifetime supply of Tablet PCs. But ZDNet seems pretty clued in to Redmond's planned announcement in a few hours. Ray Ozzie will join Bill Gates on the dais for this announcement. For you young folk out there, Ozzie is the father of LotusNotes, technology that went far to establishing enterprise networking and email communications. He was also founder of Groove Networks, which I suspect Microsoft bought just to get access to Ozzie's prolific brain.
ZD seems to be taking a dim view of Microsoft going into the services business and they see it as a staving-off strategy against the meteorically rising Google. It seems to me to be a wiser course, emulating IBM's strategy. IBM, years ago, realized that services is a higher margin business than software and has managed to build a world-class organization in it that may soon be Big Blue's core competency. Meanwhile, Redmond is proud but not foolish. The writing is on the wall that almost all software will be open and free.
But, then I have not yet even heard what Microsoft has to say yet. We shall see. We shall see.
