Microsoft’s Plan to Sell Answers

Microsoft’s 100 top managers have been told to think of ways their businesses could incorporate machine learning — which is the engineering of algorithms that analyze textual, behavioral and sensor data, and then try to form patterns and predictions.

It is at the heart of the Bing search engine, but has many other potential applications, including better logistics planning, the organization of a calendar or the design of a marketing campaign. Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, sees machine learning as a potential means to create entirely new businesses within the company. Microsoft, he said, “historically sold the software itself, and now in the cloud and services business we’re not selling you the software, we’re selling you a service that the software creates.” By adding machine learning, he explained, “what you could sell to people are answers to things.” Those answers could be uniquely valuable if they drew from Microsoft’s own data resources, culled from assets like Bing, the Windows Azure cloud computing platform and Skype, he said.