Software as a service, web applications, data portability – these are the sorts of themes that Microsoft is making moves in support of in the new computing world, in their own way. Tonight they announced a partnership with telecom provider Qwest to offer a custom, co-branded Windows Live software suite to every customer of Qwest’s internet services. This is the kind of thing that’s going to popularize Web 2.0 style software. For all the innovation and hotness of various inspiring start-ups – they are going to have a hard time competing with the market share of companies like MS and Qwest who are able to learn just fast enough to throw their weight around and really change large numbers of people’s computing experience. Can start ups be more than inexpensive labs for the big guys? Will all the free-data hippy stuff get thrown out the window when Windows takes what it wants from the paradigm and suffocates alternatives that were lost in the wilderness anyway? How much rhetoric can one get out of one press release?? 🙂

Seriously though, I think the Microsoft/Qwest partnership is big. And remember, Qwest is the one telecom that reportedly did not hand over call records to the NSA. How much is that worth? Probably not much, but maybe something.