Nov
3
The Empire Strikes Back
November 3, 2005 |
Yesterday, Microsoft rolled out its new Windows Live and Office Live services. In a somewhat less-widely noticed move, they also began a move into the VoIP market.
The Windows Live announcement was clumsy, as far as many observers were concerned. I agree–it’s not at all clear to me right now what Microsoft thinks these services are going to do (here are some theories), or what functionality Office Live will initially provide. The screenshots I’ve been able to find suggest that it’s more of an upgraded bCentral than an MS Office replacement, with the primary target market being small businesses. For those business, it can offer a VoIP service, payroll, and other applications, as well as webhosting and email.
Competitors are trash-talking the announcement, of course. But they know as well as I do that MS has a pattern of making very clumsy forays into new market spaces and then throwing money at those efforts until they either dominate that space or it’s no longer a threat to them. Don’t discount the latter–Microsoft spent a lot of money in the 1990s making sure that the Web would be a commodity service, instead of a major source of revenue for a potential competitor. If Software-as-a-Service is the future of development, expect that Microsoft will do everything in its power to ensure that they’re the major player in that market. And if it’s not–well, that’s OK too. Microsoft has always been willing to throw cash at making sure that nobody else dominates an emerging market, and they don’t care if some of those markets never do actually emerge.
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