One of the things that the Fortune article points out is that the Microsoft culture has been more technology-centric then user-centric. In other words, they look at the technological possibilities first and then try to shape it to what the user wants. That's one of the core issues that Ozzie hopes to turn around. Ray Ozzie has always looked at things from the customer's point of view first - in other words, outside-in rather than inside-out.
One example of a user-centric approach is Ozzie's announcement a few days ago about Microsoft's plan to build giant server farms around the world in order to host enterprise scale e-mail services (so that companies can forego the expense of maintianing their own servers). This global network will also be opened up to consumer users in a service to be called Live Drive where all their personal files, including rich media files, can be stored on MS servers, accessible from any machine, anywhere in the world. Putting the user first may prove to be the best move Microsoft has made in a long time.
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