Windows Live: Buzz Or Bluster?

It seems as if Microsoft did not get enough buzz from its “Live Software” event Nov. 1. Why else would company insiders “leak” an internal memo from Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates last week?

While the Web was abuzz with the news of the memo, the content really was nothing new. In his essay, Gates declared that the Internet-based software sea change was upon Microsoft, but he made the same declaration at the Live event in San Francisco, proclaiming that every Microsoft application would be available as a service in the future.

LARRY HOOPER Can be reached at (415) 947-6229 or via e-mail at lrhooper@cmp.com.

The fact is, despite all the talk about delivering Microsoft software as a service, the software behemoth’s highly touted first foray into this new realm has a lot more to do with stealing thunder from Google, or even Yahoo, than it does with the software-as-a-service movement.

In launching Windows Live and Office Live, Microsoft executives spent a lot more time talking about the company’s potential to make money selling advertising on top of these services than they did about the strategy behind delivering actual applications as a service.

Don’t get me wrong. From an individual perspective, Windows Live is cool stuff. If delivered as promised, a user can build a home page aggregating e-mail, RSS feeds, search content and recent documents from his system. Like I said, cool stuff. But it’s more likely to displace MyYahoo as a home page than it is to subsume a desktop application. And it is by no means a hosted version of Windows, despite what the name implies.

Office Live, too, appears interesting. It lets small businesses build Web sites and set up e-mail accounts for free, and adds a few more services with an annual subscription. But none of those services include Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Judging from the demo, Office Live looks more like an attempt to dress up Microsoft’s dominant desktop productivity suite than an attempt at hosted software. And I just don’t see the channel play in it, despite Microsoft’s claim that the service will open the door to the small-business market for solution providers.

Maybe the first two offerings are just the tip of the iceberg and Microsoft truly will jump into the software-as-a-service ocean, changing forever how applications are delivered. Or maybe Microsoft is just too tied to its packaged application model to get it.

Which view do you hold? Let me know at (415) 947-6229 or via e-mail at lrhooper@cmp.com.