Windows Live - doomed to fail?
When former Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble posts such a harsh attack on Microsoft’s ‘Windows Live’ policy you know that they’re in trouble. While he worked at Microsoft he was sometimes critical but never to a great extent. It’s always interesting to see what people think once they leave their former employers and speak more openly.
Scoble’s main complaint about Microsoft is they keep bragging to MVP’s (seemingly best described as a programme for Microsoft fanboys) that they’re ‘in it to win‘ on their online strategy while Ballmer is again attacking Google saying that they only do one thing well. Saying Google only do one thing well is very shortsighted, their search engine is what drives most people to their site, adwords makes them money by making it easy for anyone to advertise with Google whether your budget is a few pounds a week or a few million, Gmail has changed perception of webmail in many peoples eyes (without it then 20MB Hotmail would probably be the norm as they’d not be forced to improve). There’s a lot more useful stuff coming out of Google (Google Maps and News being the most useful), but there’s also webapps that I see lacking (such as Google Spreadsheets and Docs)that may or may not be a success in the future.
Windows Live so far has just been a collection of ‘me too’ ideas that are playing catchup to Google and Yahoo as well as rebranding the successful MSN Messenger as Windows Live Mesenger (wasn’t it .NET messenger for a while too? MS likes to push their buzzwords onto that app). Also worth remembering is that they don’t have a cool image (not helped by Steve Ballmer) so without a better product they’ll not be able to compete in the online applications arena successfully (defined as being number one when you’re Microsoft).
Microsoft has done nothing to inspire recently. I’ve been unimpressed with Vista so far (and had so much fun buying it), the Zune was really a joke compared to the competition and although IE7 was a huge improvement over IE6 it was still lacking compared to Firefox and Opera.
So come on Microsoft, impress me. I suspect if I was a gamer the Xbox 360 would be in with a chance, but the last game I played was Quake 2 so however good an Xbox is then it’d probably not appeal to me. Improve the Zune, make IE8 a browser that’d make me want to spend more time in Windows rather than Mac OS X.