'Hawk' Site Draws Those Who Eye Microsoft

But increasingly, the Web site Microsoft news junkies, including several solution providers, seek out is Watchingmicrosoftlikeahawk or, more succinctly, WMLAH.com.

WMLAH pairs far-ranging aggregation of news and analysis from local papers, foreign news sources, enthusiast sites, tech pubs (including CRN) and manages to overlay its own sardonic voice atop those tidbits.

It also sports what some argue is the funniest FAQ page in the business. (A sample: Q: What is your relationship with Microsoft?

A: Nonexistent other than we use some of their products. We also own one share of MSFT, so we can receive annual reports and stockholder communications, none of which anyone ever reads.

Q: Does Bill Gates visit your site?

A: We have no idea; we refuse his phone calls, which annoys him no end and greatly amuses us. [Publisher's Note: The phone calls are actually from the brother-in-law of the publisher pretending to be Bill Gates. He is the one greatly--and easily--amused.]

All jokes aside, WMLAH has become a must-stop site not only for reporters covering Microsoft but for Microsoft's own PR corps. Site editor Frank Hayson says every day at around 3:00 p.m. Eastern, he sees a surge of traffic coming from the wagged.com domain name used by Waggener Edstrom, the house agency for most things Microsoft.

Russell Jackson, a Microsoft Great Plains consultant working currently from Thailand, is a convert. "I travel around and am usually too busy to read all the different reports I've got coming in." Since discovering it while doing an unrelated Google search, he's canceled his other subscriptions because he feels most of the interesting stuff being written about the software giant shows up here fast.

"When I look for information, I look for nuggets. I don't care about the stock price or why it's up or down. I'm looking for information relevant to me, what's going on with Longhorn, and the CRM product and with Great Plains and with XML integration," Jackson said.

The goal is to be well-informed about Microsoft plans so he can counsel clients accordingly.

Matt Howard, vice president of business development at Groove Networks, a Beverly, Mass., ISV partially owned by Microsoft, is another fan. "What I love is the interesting editorial atop the editorial." But tone aside, "The bottom line is, as a nondeveloper in the business side of the industry, I'm looking at marketing, products; a lot of the editorial he collects is business-oriented and not all that developer crap," he noted.

Richard Warren, a consultant based in Winchester, Va., took a look at the site, but felt its content was not his cup of tea as a Microsoft solution provider. "If you're not a partner, I suspect it's good and probably more useful from a competitive analysis perspective."

Ken Winell, president of Econium, a Totowa, N.J., partner, begs to differ. He said his company, particularly the developers, tap into the site regularly.

Gauging from the domain names of visitors, WMLAH has attracted the attention of many Microsoft watchers. Hayson says of the thousands hitting the site daily are people who at least appear to be coming from what could be construed as Microsoft partners, competitors, ISVs, integrators, financial concerns and end-user companies. They run the gamut from EDS and KPMG to Adobe, Apple Computer, Autodesk, Siebel Systems, Siemens, Boeing, Anheuser Busch, Citicorp, Dell, Veritas, Marriott, Alcoa, General Electric, Wachovia Bank, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, Hayson says.

None of these readers pay a dime per se: The site is sustained with advertising sales. It is a member of Google's AdSense program and of Commission Junction's ad affiliation program.

The whole shebang started out as a hobby, said Hayson, a former management consultant with Cresap, McCormick and Paget, a firm snapped up years ago by Towers Perrin. He launched the project simply because he felt Microsoft would be an interesting company to follow. Since WMLAH's launch in the spring of 2002, it's added a WatchingGooglelikeahawk site as well. Google is poised to launch one of the most-watched IPOs ever and is also is expected to face a head-on attack from Microsoft on the Web search kingdom it dominates.

Reporters and publishers are happier with WMLAH than other aggregators, who force readers to click through their own pages before being routed to the news source. By contrast, WMLAH lists the pertinent stories each day with a one- or two-sentence summary. Any reader clicking on that spot is then sent directly through to the original story on the original site.

Asked which stories are the biggest draws, Hayson says anything Longhorn-related tends to draw big. When Office 2003 was released this fall, traffic was up nearly five times its normal volume, he noted. Another big-hit story was when Daniel Feussner, a Microsoft executive, was charged with selling discounted software bought from the company store for personal profit. Feussner subsequently died, an apparent suicide.