GigaOM

Satya Nadella

I would like to welcome the MSN team to the Search, Portal and Advertising Group (SPAG). MSN is integral to our Online Services success. It’s our key service to attract and engage users through online content experiences and direct network traffic, and is our single largest source of Ad Revenue. Joanne and team presented a plan at our annual strategy review in December to transform MSN into a next generation Portal - a software engine that delivers the most relevant and social online content experience. This vision builds on the core MSN strengths in media programming/editorial, web user experience design and publishing systems by incorporating all of the web corpus and social media. The key innovation will be around driving user centric content experiences powered by unique editorial voice and deep mining of content/search, usage and social graph. I am personally excited about having the opportunity to work with the team on moving this vision forward into implementation and helping align our editorial, data, infrastructure and algorithmic assets/efforts across our teams.

Our respective FY 08 organizational and individual commitments remain the same. We need to stay focused on our current releases and business.

Our mission in SPAG is to create unique breakthroughs in consumer online audience experiences and Ad Platform.

We will continue to execute on the following top level objectives:
1. Develop a destination search experience with broad usage and distinct differentiation
2. Reinvent MSN portal experience to drive growth of audience & engagement across the network
3. Build Ad platform scale, advertising value, and targeting capability
4. Share assets in infrastructure, data and algorithms- across Search, Portal and Advertising
5. Develop an culture that puts a premium on innovation, agility, openness & fun

We will build out our FY 09 commitments and plans using the above top level objectives in collaboration with our business & marketing colleagues.

We are going through a period of intense roadmap execution, while also having to deal with organizational change and the news of our proposal to acquire Yahoo. I first want to acknowledge that all this does cause anxiety. All of us want to know that what we are working on has deep meaning and impact. I want to assure you that it does. I want us to face up to any and all change knowing that winning in Search, Portals and Advertising is the top order bit that is critical for us and our company. Our investment and focus on innovation in Search, Portals and Advertising will continue, independent of changes to our team or in the company. We should also recognize that we are living in a “golden age” when it comes to innovation in these categories. Therefore let’s focus on innovation and work ahead knowing that each release and each step of progress in delivering additional value to our customers is what will ultimately define our success!

Please feel send me email with any questions, comments or issues.

Thanks
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Satya

The Microsoft Memos Sent Out Today By:

* Steve Ballmer Memo
* Kevin Johnson Memo
* Satya Nadella Memo