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The third step in Microsoft's evolutionary stage of the IT shop reads like a milestone in AA's twelve-step program. Ballmer calls this "rationalization," which is achieved when users' ability to generate informational workflow is balanced against the ability for IT to control and manage how that information is put to use.

"Then, of course, the ultimate goal is to get to this state that we call Dynamic IT." In prior discussions, this was advanced as a kind of nirvana-like state for a business, where agility and control and potential and various other chicken-soup-for-the-enterprise phrases mesh together in a kind of jambalaya. Today, it's being described as a state where a business can use IT as a resource for implementing new ideas rather than retroactively amortizing value from the old ones.

To bring about this evolved state, Ballmer projects a more market-driven environment, where innovators including Microsoft compete to bring about new ideas, and then come together later to standardize upon those ideas which the market has proven work best.

It's here where the company appears to have perceived a new opportunity to strike, specifically against a major competitor that advertises itself as "open" but which Ballmer and Microsoft now appear to be describing as working against market principles.

Ballmer was clearly testing an approach where the work of the open source community is characterized as emerging in dribs and drabs from a kind of an enclave, which is actually somewhat anti-social. The alternative, he proposes, is for Microsoft to truly "open up the development process" beyond the open source model, to the extent where corporations and individuals actually share good ideas rather than complain about who is and who isn't behaving in accordance with community standards.

One example of this "more open than open" strategy focuses on virtualization. Microsoft is by no means the leader in the virtualization market, Ballmer admitted, even with the addition of the Hyper-V hypervisor platform in WS2K8. And Microsoft may never be the leader there, though it could perhaps do the most to drive the spirit and the will among businesses to implement virtualization.

Risking an obvious political interpretation -- and here's that gem of the day -- Ballmer called this idea "democratizing virtualization." Later that evening, humorist Mo Rocca -- who kicked off the company's end-of-day celebration at the Mayan club -- told the audience of mostly Microsoft and AMD employees and their guests that he was a true believer in openness, in change, in doing what's right for America, in promoting peace and in democratizing virtualization.

It's a view of the world that truly does seem more fitting of a Tom Brokaw introduction than one by even as great a philanthropist as Bill Gates. And if that truly is the new way Microsoft sees the world, then indeed the company did launch something yesterday.