Mike Morris is angry. Not in a table-pounding, in-your-face kind of way. His anger is much more controlled than that-and just as unnerving. When he speaks, the volume doesn’t rise, but the speed with which the words come pouring out accelerates. You wonder when-if-he will stop for breath.
What’s got Morris irked on this otherwise cloudless spring day in Palo Alto is a software company headquartered some 850 miles to the north, in the Seattle suburb of Redmond: Microsoft Corporation. Weeks earlier, the world’s largest software maker unveiled the first piece of its breathtaking .NET Internet strategy: to sell storage services to consumers and businesses. Using a subscription model, users will be able to store and transfer information on any electronic device, from personal computers and handhelds to cell phones. In March, Microsoft rolled out Hailstorm, the chunk of .NET dedicated to consumers. Services targeting businesses are due out later this year.
