“Pew Reports: Online Activities and Pursuits - “The proportion of that daily population who are doing some well-known internet activities”:

• Email 77%
• Search engine 63%
• Get news 46%
• Do job-related research 29%
• Use instant messaging 18%
• Do online banking    18%
• Take part in chat room 8%
• Make a travel reservation 5%
• Read blogs 3%
• Participate in online auction 3%

Summary article on new report from International Telecommunications Union Internet of Things. Key Points:

• next stage in the technological revolution where humans, electronic devices, inanimate objects and databases are linked by a radically transformed Internet.
• 875 million Internet users worldwide, a number that may simply double if humans remain the primary users of the future. But experts are counting on tens of billions of human and inanimate “users” in future decades.
• ITU’s vision - refrigerators that independently communicate with grocery stores, washing machines that communicate with clothing, implanted tags with medical equipment and vehicles with stationary or moving objects.

Harry Dent, the author of the Next Great Bubble Boom argues that the Internet did not bring about a consumer revolution. Most people only use the Internet for the purchase of simple commodity products. However, it is “the expansion of broadband, advance of voice activation or speech recognition technologies (easy access) and the ultimate emergence of video interactivity (real time, personalized services) that will create the real consumer revolution in the second half of this decade.”

“Most businesses continue to cater to the middle class market with the “lowest price strategy where there is high competition and low profit margins…. But the emergence of a premium class of product and services” that will rise fast in the next decades.

Project 25-30 million millionaire and affluent households by 2009 will lead the way and set the new product trends.

The Microsoft Memo Ray “leaked” is called the the Internet Services Disruption Memo. The majority of the memo is a review of what has gone on in the past. Toward the end Ozzie notes several “key tenets” in the software-as-service/Intenet as platform evolution.

1. The power of the advertising-supported economic model.
   Online advertising has emerged as a significant new means by which to directly and indirectly fund the creation and delivery of software and services. In some cases, it may be possible for one to obtain more revenue through the advertising model than through a traditional licensing model. Only in its earliest stages, no one yet knows the limits of what categories of hardware, software and services, in what markets, will ultimately be funded through this model. And no one yet knows how much of the world?s online advertising revenues should or will flow to large software and service providers, medium sized or tail providers, or even users themselves.
2. The effectiveness of a new delivery and adoption model.
   A grassroots technology adoption pattern has emerged on the internet largely in parallel to the classic methods of selling software to the enterprise. Products are now discovered through a combination of blogs, search keyword-based advertising, online product marketing and word-of-mouth. It’s now expected that anything discovered can be sampled and experienced through self-service exploration and download. This is true not just for consumer products: even enterprise products now more often than not enter an organization through the internet-based research and trial of a business unit that understands a product’s value.

   Limited trial use, ad-monetized or free reduced-function use, subscription-based use, on-line activation, digital license management, automatic update, and other such concepts are now entering the vocabulary of any developer building products that wish to successfully utilize the web as a channel. Products must now embrace a discover, learn, try, buy, recommend cycle, sometimes with one of those phases being free, another ad-supported, and yet another being subscription-based. Grassroots adoption requires an end-to-end perspective related to product design. Products must be easily understood by the user upon trial, and useful out-of-the-box with little or no configuration or administrative intervention.

   But enabling grassroots adoption is not just a product design issue. Today’s web is fundamentally a self-service environment, and it is critical to design websites and product “landing pages” with sophisticated closed-loop measurement and feedback systems. Even startups use such techniques in conjunction with pay-per-click advertisements. This ensures that the most effective website designs will be selected to attract discovery of products and services, help in research and learning, facilitate download, trial and purchase, and to enable individuals’ self-help and making recommendations to others. Such systems can recognize and take advantage of opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell products to individuals, workgroups and businesses, and also act as a lead generation front-end for our sales force and for our partners. 

3. The demand for compelling, integrated user experiences that just work.
   The PC has morphed into new form factors and new roles, and we increasingly have more than one in our lives - at work, at home, laptops, tablets, even in the living room. Cell phones have become ubiquitous. There are a myriad of handheld devices. Set-top boxes, PVRs and game consoles are changing what and how we watch television. Photos, music and voice communications are all rapidly going digital and being driven by software. Automobiles are on a path to become smart and connected. The emergence of the digital lifestyle that utilizes all these technologies is changing how we learn, play games, watch TV, communicate with friends and family, listen to music and share memories.

   But the power of technology also brings with it a cost. For all the success of individual technologies, the array of technology in a person’s life can be daunting. Increasingly, individuals choose products and services that are highly-personalized, focused on the end-to-end experience delivered by that technology. Products must deliver a seamless experience, one in which all the technology in your life just works and can work together, on your behalf, under your control. This means designs centered on an intentional fusion of internet-based services with software, and sometimes even hardware, to deliver meaningful experiences and solutions with a level of seamless design and use that couldn’t be achieved without such a holistic approach.”

The memo is long - if time is limited check out the What’s Different section in addition to the Key Tenets. Finally, a refreshing note to hear from Microsoft is his comment “Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration. Moving forward, within all parts of the organization, each of us should ask What’s different, and explore and embrace techniques to reduce complexity.”