Microsoft 2008: Where are the opportunities?

Yeah, I don’t work there any more, and I’m practicing saying “they” instead of “we”, but I still think that Microsoft’s situation is extremely interesting from a strategy perspective. So as a companion to Mini’s What’s going well?, MSFTextrememakeover’s Will this dog ever hunt again, Joe Wilcox’s Definitive, unsolicited advice, Slashdot’s Microsoft’s biggest threat, and no doubt a jillion other posts, I figured I’d start up a thread specifically on the topic of opportunities for Microsoft in the upcoming year.

To kick things off, I’ve highlighted a few I think are particularly compelling: put the user truly in control of their information, make Live the best front end to the network-of-networks, and abandon DRM — it’s too late for that to help Vista, but think about the effects on Zune and Windows 7.0 “now DRM-free”. Discussion of those is welcome, as are other ideas. And please try to keep the focus on the opportunities; of course there are plenty of things wrong, but the threads elsewhere are already covering those.