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Jean-Louis Gassée, general partner at Allegis Capital, has a guest post over on Dan Farber’s blog, he speculates on how Microsoft’s business model may change in the coming years.

His conclusion reads as follows;

My guess is Steve Ballmer is working on a combined answer, one that is sketched before our very eyes already. Microsoft’s Live services are but a rehearsal for a much bigger act, Microsoft’s Cloud OS, sometimes called Strata. And, based on Microsoft’s own Cloud services, we’ll see a Danger-based smartphone, as proprietary as the Xbox and the iPod competitor Zune. Put another way, Microsoft’s future business model will borrow from Apple and Google, it will have two components: proprietary devices and “universal” Cloud services. And like its models, it will attempt to extract extra profits by nicely tying both components together. For example: iPods are tied to the iTunes service, Android phones might (we don’t know yet) better enjoy Google applications.

The company is certainly evolving, it is always evolving… the Microsoft that I work for today is nothing at all like the one I joined in late 1994, and I suspect the Microsoft of 2015 will only vaguely resemble the one of today.

We’ll have to wait and see how accurate Jean-Louis’ post is…