This part is eye-catching:

One of the cornerstones of the strategy, I've heard, will be an aggressive acceleration of the company's investment in its data center network. The construction program will be "totally over the top," said a person briefed on the plan. The first phase of the buildout, said the source, will include the construction of about two dozen data centers around the world, each covering about 500,000 square feet or more. The timing of the construction is unclear.

This is a company so intent on building out its online infrastructure that it is offering $44.6 billion to buy Yahoo. But building 20-plus, massive data centers is a special kind of "wow." If Carr's speculation is correct, this would leave a question as to whether this would be a massive transformation or a massive distraction for the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant. Consider how resource-intensive Microsoft says it may be just to upgrade to Server 2008 without breaking an Exchange deployment. Now consider the very same company building, running and maintaining 24 of the world's largest data centers. (And that's just Phase 1.)

And if you've read Microsoft's latest 10-Q filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, you'll see that the company's data center costs for its online businesses have already been costly and draining profits from other areas of the company.

How will Microsoft afford it? Well, Carr also suggests the company will surprise many with its plans to embrace open source. . .