Ray Ozzie on Attention

In my opinion this is some of the most significant news to date in the development of the attention economy (and thanks to Seth Goldstein for pointing it out to me.)

Last week Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, talked to financial analysts about the company's strategy as the technology industry shifts to a web services model, and he not only emphasized the importance of attention data in that strategy, but he also made reference to user control over that data. First Ozzie discussed Windows Live:

We know that a centralized service can be a great place to store or cache things so they can be accessed anywhere on the Net, and to organize things and share things with others.

So in our case, we consider what can be done for the user by assuming the presence of a new service infrastructure that does such things, a set of centralized services that in our case we call Windows Live. The services offered up by the Windows Live platform are available to Web sites and also to client applications and also to mobile applications. And this is key to our strategy. Because it's our aspiration to create seamless Web, desktop and mobile experiences for all activities relevant to users and customers in all our markets.

And our model for doing so is to use our Windows Live services platform as an experience hub, and to use the PC, the browser and mobile devices as different experience-delivery mechanisms for the value we aspire to deliver.

In other words, Microsoft is using Windows Live as a hub to bring it all together.

Later Ozzie noted the central role that attention data will play within Windows Live:

The Windows Live services platform serves three distinct roles. First, it makes it easier for developers both inside and outside of Microsoft to quickly and easily create open, interoperable, broad-scale Internet applications and services.

Second, its purpose is to observe and aggregate the behavioral activity of users in a manner respectful of their privacy, both to improve the user experience and to improve profitability. [Emphasis added]

And third, its purpose is to serve as a common back end for monetization supporting all three services' business models—advertising, subscriptions and transactions.

New applications & services + attention data = improved user experience & profitability. That's a fairly straightforward equation, but Ozzie went even further to emphasize the importance of attention data and of user control:

When talking about a platform in the classic sense, as in Windows or .NET, it's all too easy to focus almost exclusively on the infrastructure elements of that platform. After all, every development platform must have application frameworks and APIs and databases and the like. And the same, of course, is very much the case with this new type of platform. Windows Live's infrastructure services represent a very significant investment from a capital, operational and technical innovation perspective. It takes quite a bit of cleverness to economically serve hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

But beyond infrastructure services, what's most unique and valuable about a very large-scale services platform is what I'll refer to as optimization. By optimization I mean the monitoring and utilization of both collective end-user behavior and individual behavior to rank content for the user. [Emphasis added] That ranked content might be the order of advertisements in a search or e-mail window, or the order of relevant news items or playlists or video clips or items in a marketplace that are presented to the user.

We see the power of optimization every day in the relevancy of search engines and on Web sites such as Digg or Reddit and YouTube and Amazon.

Optimization always respectful of a user's privacy will be increasingly key to delivering great user experiences, and it's already a key factor in the area of profitability, because the larger the number of users that are connected to any services platform, the more behavioral the data that can be generated. The larger the number of PCs and other devices that are connected to that platform, the more behavioral data that's available; the larger the number of applications connected to the platform, both Web apps and desktop apps, the better our optimizations will be and the more profitable it will be for us and for our partners. [Emphasis added]

I don't think "privacy" fully encompasses the rights that users should have over their personal attention data, but it's a great start. (As an alternative, I'd humbly suggest AttentionTrust's founding principles.) And at the very least, Ozzie has made it clear that Microsoft is thinking extensively about 1) the value and utility of attention data, 2) the fundamental role it will play in a web services world, and 3) the importance of user control. That's pretty big news to me.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+data attention+economy microsoft ray+ozzie windows+live