What Can You Do Better on the Internet?

My experience at Microsoft shows me that our customers want to be able to serve themselves. They want to be able to go get the information themselves. They want to answer their own questions.
Take small business today, which is not served by the PC industry and IT terribly well. For example, it's just too complicated to buy a set of computers and network them together. You pay a guy $120 an hour and he comes out and stitches them together and maybe throws on a piece of software. Small businesses will be better served when there is a service that can manage the interaction between the service and the computers, allowing you to automate things that are complicated and expensive today. So, Microsoft is trying to think through how we use the Internet to change the service process.
Improving meetings and communication is another area to consider. Can you to have a richer dialogue with customers because you are all on the Internet? There are times when you want to have some kind of real-time audio, audio/video discussion, and you want to be able to look at the same documents at the same time, and share those documents. When it comes to changing the online experience in some important way, none of these communications technologies has really been as pioneered as I think they will be.
Creating new marketplaces or new ways of interacting in the marketplace also deserves focus. It is very hard in the physical world to bring large enterprises, small businesses, and consumers together at the same time. We simulate it with dealer networks or affiliate networks. If you're in the healthcare business, there are hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare insurers, and patients trying to come together. If you're in the auto business, there are dealers and manufacturers, and consumers trying to come together. The Internet not only provides a way to knit business-to-business buying, but will also enable dealers, consumers, and businesses to come together in different ways. This will wind up benefiting the people who set up these relationships and are able to figure out a way to profit by them.
Another area that doesn't currently receive enough attention is what we call "the digital feedback loop." The Internet gives you real-time learning, and yet most companies aren't understanding and improving their products or services as fast as they could given the potential feedback loop from the Internet. Most companies are still very casual today when it comes to their Internet interactions with customers.