While most agency CEOs climbed through the account management path in ad agencies to the corner office, Brien is a former media agency executive, more familiar with buying ad time than creating ads.
Microsoft has already had to make concessions on price to fend off competition from Google, offering consumers a stripped down, ad supported version of Office for free via the web.
With little notice, 802.11 is already available at millions of sites, growing in office networks in the ad hoc way that Napster did in computers last year ( See Dvorak column, p. 60).