Mole alert at Redmond, somebody call Bill Murray from Caddyshack.

A few folks are wondering if these memos were intentionally leaked because the mainstream press already has stories about them, but for those of you who want to make up your own minds about what was actually said you’re in luck. Dave Winer pressed his sources inside Microsoft and obtained separate internal memos by Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie. I encourage readers to go check these out and draw your own conclusions.

Notable Gates quote:

We will build our strategies around Internet services and we will provide a broad set of service APIs and use them in all of our key applications. This coming “services wave” will be very disruptive.”

My interpretation: Windows Live and Office Live aren’t going to be gimmicks, Microsoft is going to put some muscle behind these tools.

Ozzie’s memo leads into an area that I find even more compelling and crucial to Microsoft turning the ship around: advertising. Ozzie’s comments:

Most challenging and promising to our business, though, is that a new business model has emerged in the form of advertising-supported services and software. This model has the potential to fundamentally impact how we and other developers build, deliver, and monetize innovations. No one yet knows what kind of software and in which markets this model will be embraced, and there is tremendous revenue potential in those where it ultimately is.

I believe that Microsoft’s opportunity lies with the webmasters. It’s one of their weakest areas. If their Adcenter can’t compete against Adsense and YPN, forget about it. Microsoft needs webmasters to help promote them, that’s what Google and Yahoo understand and have worked very hard to cultivate. Microsoft can’t do it all themselves, they need to reach out and share which is something they haven’t had a very good track record of doing. It will be very interesting to see how Adcenter compares.

As for Windows Live and Office Live? Still way too early there. One hasn’t been released, and the other shouldn’t have been released this soon.

Ozzie mentions Xbox 360 and I saw a separate story projecting three million Xbox 360’s will be sold in the first three months. This is certainly the best time of year for a retail assault of any kind, so that projection could pan out. But again I’m curious how and/or if the Xbox 360 will be integrating with the web. Dynamic gamer tags that can be displayed on websites is a start, but will it be enough?

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