Ross Mayfield tells us in a blog entry that Microsoft is about to announce a major Software-As-A-Service strategy, and that this will represent a "break from the past" (with his entry titled Turn on a Dime).

I faintly recall Microsoft talking about this before. In fact, various factions of Microsoft have been pushing this idea since at least back in 1998. Software as a service is pretty much an obvious dream of all software vendors.

(Bill Gates speech from 2001 includes the statement "There is just no doubt that having Microsoft viewed as a company that can provide operational excellence is critical to our shift to software as a service, and we're putting in place the infrastructure and the team to make sure that that happens.")

Of course having a pie-in-the-sky idea is one thing, but actually making it materialize as a viable, continuing business is quite another. Just look at Sun's rentable grid computing experiment - a year on, and not a single customer. Microsoft has actually been at the forefront of a lot of business ideas, but it generally gets drowned out by the overwhelming success of their core, traditional products, to the point that people forget they were doing it.

Couple that with the fact that Microsoft's service strategy has some problems. For instance MapPoint Web Services was in the web service mapping game long before Google maps, but it was made irrelevant by the high cost of entry.