Johnson: Windows Live -- there are two aspects of it. One clearly is the set of seamless user experiences that we deliver to the market -- the way that people look at messaging, communication, storage (and) identity. The second piece of it is the Windows Live platform, and creating the world's largest, most scalable, programmable platform on the Internet.
We are doing a lot of work really defining the (programming interfaces) and the programmability of the components of that Windows Live platform. We announced at MIX '06 this set of APIs to make search programmable. Within 30 days...there were over 60 search macros that developers had already built and put up on the Windows Live site.
There are hundreds of gadgets now that have been built with our gadget technology. These are examples of how the Windows Live platform will evolve to be programmable, and the outreach that we are doing to developers to enable that.
But I would also say there is work being done on sort of the (next version) of that Windows Live platform and how we dramatically open up the programmability of Windows Live, so that we can continue to embrace the innovation and creativity from developers around the world. That's a big part of what Ray Ozzie is driving for us in the company and my partnership with Ray.
What pays for many of the Windows Live services is advertising. You guys recently rolled out AdCenter (Microsoft's home-built ad engine). How we can measure whether the business side of this is working for Microsoft?
Johnson: How would I look and say measure the success of Windows Live? No. 1, it's about do we create value for the user and Windows Live activations? And how many people are using those services?
When you look today, we have over 260 million users of our Hotmail and messaging products (and) communications products. As Windows Live comes out with the new Live Mail and Live Messenger and Spaces, are we creating value that's driving user adoption? That's one metric of success.
Certainly the second metric of success will be the number of advertisers that come to AdCenter...To make this business model work, you've got to have critical mass of users and a critical mass of advertisers.
If you do those things well, it's going to lead to revenue growth.
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