The online world is buzzing with the news of Microsoft’s conversion to Web 2.0!
Tim O’Reilly is quite positive about it:
Overall, leaves me with a lot of optimism that Microsoft is fully engaged with the right problems, and we’ll be hearing a lot more from them.
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch said:
After what I saw today, I despair for many a silicon valley startup. Seriously.
And Om Malik, in what has to be one of the more original posts on Microsoft’s announcement reckons:
A little nip-and-tuck, some hip-hop and a $500 haircut with highlights to hide the 40-odd summers. Its a midlife crisis you can see from a mile. Trust me!
What are they all on about? Well, yesterday Microsoft announced two new services – Windows Live and Office Live – these are not, as the name might imply, online replacements for Windows and Office (more’s the pity – but i guess that’s one cash cow not ready for the slaughterhouse just yet!) – they are more like portal sites.
Windows Live, for example, is Start.com but there’s loads more coming to it we are promised – just look at the Windows Live Ideas page.
The announcement was made by Bill Gates himself, and by Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie – and it is being claimed as another “turn on a dime” moment (remember the last one was in 1995 when Bill realised that there was something out there called the Internet and people were using it without paying microsoft anything?).
Personally, if it weren’t for Michael Arrington’s enthusing, I’d fail to be even slightly whelmed!
UPDATE:
I just spotted the Live.com team have a blog
Further Edited to add:
Of course, if you have a Mac, don’t bother trying to view live.com – as usual microsoft’s developers live in a monocultural Windows only world – the chances of them taking over the web when they stubbornly refuse to develop for other platforms are, thankfully, small!
Yet another update:
I see Joel Spolsky has also rounded on Live.com’s poor Firefox support and DHTML issues
So what’s the huge problem? It doesn’t work on non IE browsers? I fail to see how not working with Mac is that big a problem, Garageband doesn’t exactly work with my PC and besides there is MS made software that works on Mac but doesn’t exist on PC on the otherhand there is no Apple working on Windows and not visa versa analog.
Dave,
c’mon, seriously. Garageband is an app not a website – I can’t think of any Apple website which doesn’t run on a PC.
I don’t quite get the “no Apple working on Windows and not visa versa analog” point but Apple’s iTunes runs on PC in case that answers your point 😀
Sorry I wasn’t clear enough what I meant to say is that Microsoft have software that only works on Mac, Apple have no software that only works on Windows and not Mac. Microsoft write loads of stuff for Mac but Apple to the best of my knowledge just have iTunes and Quicktime.
Why does the fact that the MS website not work on Mac such a large problem, if they decide to eliminate a market surely that’s their prerogative, to me it’s no different than not writing an application for a particular platform.
That’d be fair enough if they did decide to eliminate the mac market but my point in the post was not restricted to the Mac platform – the site appears to only work in IE on Windows (and even then not very well according to the Spolsky article I linked to!).
However even more fundamental then that is the site’s raison d’etre – the site is a portal site – it is supposed to attract as many visits as possible and thereby earn advertising revenue – it is not supposed to exclude people.