"We are hell bent and determined to allocate the talent, resources, money and innovation to become a powerhouse in the advertising business," he said. Microsoft is currently in third place in online advertising, behind Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., but he pointed to some Microsoft successes, such as deals to provide ads for Facebook and Digg, as evidence of potential to improve that position.

Facebook and Digg, yeah right. Those are constitute a holding position. Microsoft and Google know there is money in monitoring your desktop activities. Writing a memo on the need for more storage, no problem MS' uber-monitor will show the names and tag lines of a storage vendors right in Word for you. Writing something a little more personal, no problem Microsoft knows just what you need to keep your relationships on track. This is crazy but this is where some want to take us. ComputerWorld goes on with Ballmer's bright picture of the future:

Those workers will help bring about new innovations during the next 10 years, a period that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said he expects will be more exciting than the past 30 years of the company's history. That's because the processing power of computers and the speed of broadband networks is enabling new types of applications.

Read: surveillance

Rebecca Harold at the Realtime IT Compliance Community has commented on Microsoft and other's feigned attempts at concern for privacy. She is just commenting on storing search queries and even with this limited disregard for privacy she concludes:

It's rather sad that what they view as improved privacy practices still have a very long way to go.

The European Union continues to address privacy issues more forcefully than in the US but the uber-monitor that could be in our future may be enough to prompt us to remind Microsoft, Google and others there is a private sphere in all of our lives and we need to keep it that way.