Microsoft Live — No Guts?
In his Nerd’s Eye View column Microsoft Live: Dead on Arrival, Fred Davis points out that Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place with Windows Live and Office Live:
Although Microsoft has done well with its copy-cat strategy in the past, the company is up against what may turn out to be the toughest competitor it’s ever faced: Google. Google has the advantage of not having to limit its offerings to protect other parts of its business. Microsoft is already going to upset a lot of its software developer partners by competing with them with the Office Live paid services…
For Microsoft’s Live strategy to really have a life of its own, Microsoft must be willing to make Windows Live and Office Live strong enough to not just kill off the competition, but also to kill off Microsoft’s existing software-based business. Whether they have both the vision and the guts to do so remains to be seen.
As I wrote in Live Dead: Microsoft Demos its Version of the 21st Century Internet, Microsoft’s free services won’t replace its commercial software. Live Office, for example, will simply be an incremental improvement to the service already offered — the Office Online Web site for extras like downloadable templates. Live Office will add sales and collaboration tools and 10 gigs of free storage. This is not rocket science or even Googleware. It just scans nicely for the newspapers.
Windows Live is even less thrilling. Customize your home page, add RSS feeds, use a Web mail client that looks more like Outlook. Give me a break. It is basically a customization engine for MSN. Its coolest feature is something Mac users have had in their Dashboards for about a year: “gadgets” (which are similar to the Mac’s “widgets”).
The Mac might have been easy for Microsoft to copy-cat, but Google is an animal of a different stripe. If I worked at Microsoft, I’d be proposing that the company split itself into three companies: the Live group, the Office/applications group, the Windows/Vista group. Let them compete freely and then see what happens in this competitive race with Google.
