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Last Thursday, after the Microsoft Hosting Summit wrapped up, the WHIR contingent had the opportunity to tour Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington campus with lead marketing manager for hosted solutions Michael van Dijken.

The tour actually began at the company’s Bellevue office, just a few steps from the Westin hotel, where the conference took place.

We didn’t spend much time at the Bellevue office, but we did get a chance to check out the lunchroom on the top floor which has a beautiful (dare I say, belle) view of Seattle - not to mention the very strangely enclosed immediate vicinity in Bellevue.

Over at the Richmond campus, the really remarkable thing is not necessarily the offices themselves - which from what we saw were about what you’d expect from any normal office space - but the overall scale of the campus itself.

It’s probably fair to say that with a few exceptions scattered throughout, Microsoft’s campus takes up about just all of what we saw of the city of Redmond (like Bellevue, a sort of suburb of Seattle). Obviously that’s not entirely the case, but according to van Dijken, Microsoft currently has in the vicinity of 40,000 employees working at the campus. And according to Wikipedia, a recent census puts the city’s population at somewhere in the range of 46,000. So anyway, it’s close.

Another remarkable aspect of the campus is the fairly excellent job Microsoft has done building around the green parts of the city. There are trees - really huge trees, as a matter of fact - just about everywhere you look. Nice place to visit and, presumably, a nice place to work.

We spent a good chunk of our time in the Visitor Center, which provided some entertainment, as well as some of the best photo opportunities. I suppose it’s a testament to my vanity that among my favorites was a picture of me, but there were some pretty amusing scenes - and it’s my blog, so I suppose you’ll have to bear with me just this once.

Another of the really interesting features of the campus was the “Connect” system Microsoft has in place. Because it’s such a big place, the company - in an interesting eco-friendly undertaking - has set up a system of hybrid cars to shuttle employees between offices on-campus, which saves them from having to get into their cars to drive a mile or two. It’s worth noting the sheer number of these shuttles. They were really everywhere, making up a sizeable percentage of the cars we saw on the streets.

Finally, we set up with Michael van Dijken for a WHIRtv interview. The full video of which can be viewed on the WHIRtv blog page.

These are just a few of the pictures I took on the tour. There are dozens more you can check out on our WHIR flickr page.

The WHIR team recently had the pleasure of attending Microsoft’s fourth annual Hosting Summit in Seattle, WA (which, for the record, is breath-takingly gorgeous and seems to have a unique balance between man and nature, and I could go on and on, but I digress). Hopefully you followed the ever-eloquent Liam Eagle in his live coverage of the event and checked out some of the photos from the summit on our Flickr site.

Lucky for us, after the summit we had the opportunity to explore Microsoft’s campus in Redmond (we saw the executive offices that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer work in AND played in Microsoft’s museum) and took a moment to chat to a familiar guest on WHIRtv, Michael van Dijken, Microsoft’s lead marketing manager for hosted services. Michael had some enlightening things to say regarding the direction Microsoft is taking with its partners through these events.

In the coming week we’ll be bringing you some of the attendee feedback we collected from the event, and let me just say that the openness and willingness from Microsoft’s partners to share their thoughts and opinions was rather impressive.

I also wanted to bring to your attention that WHIRtv is now available through iTunes so if you want these videos conveniently delivered to you every time we post a new one, be sure to subscribe here.

Microsoft is a sort of fountain of terminology. Every time I speak to somebody at the company, I hear an acronym or a term I’m not familiar with. And a Microsoft-led series of presentations is just a concentration of that situation. There were whole pieces of software mentioned or alluded to in the Wednesday sessions that I’d never heard of. Microsoft is a big company.

One expression that came up pretty consistently on Wednesday was Microsoft’s notion of the “software + services” ecosystem. This is not a new expression, but it’s an important distinction that’s worth understanding thoroughly.

I had the opportunity to talk to Michael Van Dijken, Microsoft’s marketing manager for hosted services, Wednesday about that very thing.

Importantly, “software + services” is not a semantic distinction (it’s not a different way of describing, say, “software as a service”). It’s a description of Microsoft’s vision for the software environment - which certainly involves software as a service.

Software as a service is the much-discussed delivery relationship that has a lot of people excited. On-demand software hosted in the cloud, in the opinions of many, is the future of software delivery - and the future of the hosting business.

Micrsoft’s software+ services distinction, describes the idea that SaaS is a delivery mechanism, and while some applications such as Exchange or CRM lend themselves to that model (the excitement about SaaS is certainly not unfounded), others simply don’t. They do, and will continue to, lend themselves to a desktop or on-premise model.

Many applications, he says, lend themselves to a blended model, in which an application has parts that are installed, and parts that are delivered as a service. As an example of this he offers the Xbox Live service. A video game can be played offline, on-premise, but the service piece, which enables players to play together online adds considerable value.

This combination is why Microsoft doesn’t think of itself as a “SaaS company.” It’s not a defensive distinction, says van Dijken. It’s a description of how Microsoft sees the world. We’re not living in a world where all the software will be hosted in the cloud. Microsoft doesn’t see its path as becoming like Google or Salesforce.com.

And those competitors have validated this thinking somewhat by introducing offline components to their services. Google released the desktop-installed Google Gears, and even Salesforce.com has issued offline pieces of its applications.

From a hosting perspective, hosts would probably prefer that all software transition to the on-demand model, considering the business that would create. Hosts typically aren’t that interested in talking about the on-premise delivery model. But they ought to be very interested in the applications that will have service components. There’s a big opportunity there, says Microsoft, for partnering with the ISVs developing that software.

Software + services isn’t a description of a fully-developed marketplace, or a view from a crystal ball. It’s an impression of the ecosystem that might develop around software and software as a service, and a best guess as to how things are likely to shake out. Nobody’s quite certain what the value chain is going to look like, but Microsoft is trying to provide its partners with a model that will help provide ISVs and hosts with a model for working together.