Recently released numbers show fairly solid figures from Microsoft - $60 billion dollars a year in revenue with $15.84 billion for the fiscal fourth quarter.  Despite this growth, I find it interesting that I keep observing headlines like the one in today's WSJ that reads,  "Microsoft Shakeup Won't Lead to Big Changes for Business." Some cynics expresss skepticism towards Microsoft's financial outlook, but I haven't given up hope on the industry giant yet.

In my opinion, if Microsoft wants to successfully plan for the future of business, they need to understand three major changes:

1.  Web 2.0 technologies are gaining momentum in the enterprise – these new technologies are faster, better and more cost effective to deploy versus on-premise business applications. Further, they are easy to write, edit and amplify by crowds of people, rather than a large and bureaucratized enterprise. Business applications are neither easy to edit, modify or amplify by crowds and therefore they are expensive to maintain and modify as businesses change.  Web 2.0 technologies are CHEAPER.

2.  Social interactions are moving from consumer sites to business.  Although most companies and their leaders hate to admit it, social interactions are core to everything everyone does – both at home and in the workplace.   However, it took MySpace and Facebook to skyrocket before businesses really began to understand their importance in the enterprise.    Most standard business applications today (primarily MS products) are neither social nor interactive.  This won’t cut it long term if companies believe that in the end, serving and supporting people is what they do. Business applications need to incorporate social functions in order to have a real future in the market. 

3. Companies are becoming more transparent.  This practice goest against traditional business applications that written to enable leaders to accumulate and hoard information.   In the world of business applications as we know it, the enterprise is the center of the world.  In the new networked based company, the individual and all of their relationships become the center.  Information sharing is the future of all applications because the more people share what they know and who they know, the more valuable the business and all of its relationships become.  Networked based businesses and their related software solutions are the future for all companies.

Every day I try to tell people that web 2.0 technologies are powering social interactions both inside and outside organizations.  They're helping to create new models of business and society where customers, employoees, and citizens are capable of sharing insight and intelligence freely and transparently.  To what extent is Microsoft and their bretheren - Oracle, SAP, Adobe, Cisco, and IBM- internalizing these messages?  I predict they'll eventually get it, but the question is, will companies like Mzinga get there first?