So I actually get Microsoft’s new Live initiative. It makes perfect sense for Microsoft to really go after the online application space as not only are they the standard bearer for many of the desktop apps which online apps emulate, but technically, if I remember correctly, they’re the ones that added in the XML objects to the browser which even makes stuff like AJAX possible. They’re not just following the latest fads and trends here, they’ve been thinking of this stuff since “Hailstorm” years ago.

It seems that the difference between then and now is instead of tackling everything in a monolithic platform play which scared the bejeesus out of everyone from partners to privacy advocates, they’re going to go the grassroots route of GMail, Writely and other Web 2.0 style apps instead. Starting small and building services one by one - the Live.com portal is the first example of this. I can imagine subdomains like todo.live.com or calendar.live.com as Microsoft branded PIM apps, then more and more ambitious apps added as they start to flesh out their services. This time they’ll do online apps in a much more realistic piecemeal way, and use their new advertising network to help make it all profitable and worthwhile. (That was the other thing that was missing in 2000 - there was no real viable web app business plan).

This is all well and good, and if it stopped there I think many of us might be wondering what all the fuss was about. Ahh, but not so fast. The names that Microsoft chose to launch with show their true intentions and motives. Instead of creating a new “Live” service and concentrating on making that a new profitable business, they instead launched “Windows Live” and “Office Live” as extensions to their desktop monopolies. Live.com isn’t just for new online web apps (as it would appear at first glance) but are meant to be integrated consumer services just like Apple’s iTunes. Ray Ozzie actually gave that as an example today in explaining the power of tying all their different products and services together in one seamless package for consumers.

But that’s the key word here of course: Tying.

Though it doesn’t seem to make sense for Live to have the Windows or Office names right now - live.com is just another web dashboard at the moment - there are far more ambitious plans to come. The Windows and Office monikers are there because Microsoft will, of course, be up to it’s old tricks by heavily integrating Live services into the desktop sucking the air supply out of any online competitors. It doesn’t seem that they should be allowed to do this sort of thing, but the success of iTunes seems to have given them a new excuse to start tying products again. And hell, the DOJ agreement only lasts until 2007, no? I can easily see MS adding links throughout their OS and Office products as they have with Passport, Hotmail and MSN in an effort to push these new services.

And it doesn’t stop there. Microsoft has announced massive Live integration of Messenger buddy lists to make sure that not only are you using their online services, but that all your IM contacts do as well. (They talked of 8 billion “relationships” to take advantage of). As heavy-handed as this seems, it works. Microsoft has a dominating presence in IM outside the US and are well represented domestically as well. How many people do you know have a Passport account simply to make that damn bubble which appears constantly in new XP installs go away? I know many.

How do you compete against this onslaught? I’m not sure. Just today we saw a variety of established Web companies already being targeted: Salesforce, Plaxo, Google Search and Maps, AIM, My Yahoo! and more - and that’s just on day one. Imagine what the near future is going to bring? Microsoft most likely has more cash on hand than these companies have in total profits this year combined, so there’s really no discounting this new initiative. If Microsoft executes, it could definitely spell another monopoly in the making.

Yep, for Microsoft, Live isn’t about Web 2.0 at all, it’s all about Monopoly 4.0.

-Russ

6:15:03 PM    comment   

Go check out I4U’s video of the new Nokia N92 Video/TV phone in action. Pretty freaking cool. Like iPod with video, only no syncing needed.

Matt has a good roundup of all the other announcements made today at Nokia’s Mobility Conference in Barcelona. Lots of cool new gadgets and open source stuff as well.

Cool beans.

-Russ

6:14:44 PM    comment   

Having been on a plane earlier, I've been trying to catch up on Microsoft's announcements today. (The best rundown on the event I've seen is Tim O'Reilly's; the best analysis is Dana Gardner's.) Much is still fuzzy, particularly the precise tiered-pricing model for Office Live (as opposed to Office Dead, I guess) - and how much is covered by ads alone. But in general it looks like a good, smart move by Microsoft, surprisingly aggressive in its breadth without being excessively risky.

The company's challenge in moving to the software-as-a-service era has always been more about timing than technology: Shift too late, and you risk losing the market; shift too early, and you leave lots of traditional license profit on the table. With its Live plan, it seems to have struck a balance that, on paper, at least, looks smart. As Gardner writes: "By targeting small businesses with Windows- and Office-like services and juxtaposing them to contextual advertising, Microsoft diversifies its business model closer to what Google and what other software-as-a-service vendors do, but does not really dent its historic money making machines: the Windows operating system and Office suite of personal productivity applications. At least not for some time." And by integrating the utility version of Office with the on-premise version (it remains to be seen how that will work), it has the potential to put a tough barrier in Google's path into the business market.

Now, we'll see how well Microsoft can actually execute the plan. Can it make its battleship maneuver like Google's cigarette boat?

One final note: There's a real rush right now to give software away and make money from advertising. The strategy is built on aggressive projections for on-line ad revenues as far as the eye can see. What nobody's talking about is the fact that advertising is a very cyclical business. If you're publishing a newspaper or magazine, you have considerable variable costs (paper, editorial content) that you can trim when there's weakness in the ad market. With software-as-a-service, you don't have that flexibility in the cost structure of your business. (Your customers aren't going to use your software less because there's an ad recession going on.) At some point, and it will probably be sooner than the current rosy forecasts suggest, the on-line ad market will take a dip. Then things will get very interesting very fast.

6:14:16 PM    comment   

The elitist-hippie-boy-scout culture of the Web 2.0 intelligentsia is funny in itself, but that doesn't mean a good parody isn't welcome.

6:13:53 PM    comment   

Give little kids a big bowl of free candy, and they'll keep eating until they get sick. Give adults the same bowl, and most of them will pick out a couple of their favorites and then walk away to do something else. That's pretty much the way it goes with any freebie - you consume a whole lot for a while, then you start tapering off, becoming more selective.

Blogs (and, I'd suspect, other free media) are no different. Recently, we've seen people start to fret about the looming attention crisis, which is a highfalutin way of saying they're becoming overwhelmed by the number of blogs in their RSS feeds. Om Malik speaks for many of us when he writes, "I have been overwhelmed, and have started trimming the feed list." This is the blogospheric equivalent of "Mommy, my tummy hurts."

Some people max out at 5 feeds, some at 50. I've even read some people claim they're topping out at a truly nauseating 200. I currently have 27 feeds, and that's way too many. I've gone from adding to pruning. Most of us will ultimately cut back to a handful of blogs that we read regularly, supplementing them with the odd post from here or there. That's only natural.

What it means, though, is that the blogosphere is going to end up looking a lot like the old "mainstream media." Rather than being a great democratic free-for-all, the blogosphere will become steadily more rigid and hierarchical. Structurally, it'll resemble the magazine world. A relatively small number of high-traffic blogs will dominate the market, and then there'll be a whole lot of more specialized blogs with fewer readers. (I'm not including here the zillions of "my diary" blogs, which are not aimed at gaining broad readerships and tend to be short-lived, anyway.) It won't be quite as hard for blogs to climb the hierarchy as it is in the print world (simply because the costs of blogging are so much lower), but it won't be easy, either.

Indeed, the technologies we use to manage our blog reading will reinforce the hierarchy. RSS, for example, imposes the old subscription model on the blogosphere - it's fundamentally anti-democratic, as it tends to lock us into a set of favorite blogs. (Even though blogs are free, the subscription model imposes real switching costs.) Also, the inevitable (in my view) shift away from blog search engines based on posting date (like Technorati's traditional default mode) to ones that use measures of "relevance" based on traffic or link intensity (like Google or Sphere.com or Technorati's "authority" engine) will also make the hierarchy more rigid and less democratic - as will third-party headline aggregators like Memeorandum, which also tend to reflect and reinforce established patterns of popularity.

The fact is, truly democratic media is good in theory but exhausting in practice. Our natural bent toward efficiency in consuming information will turn blogs into another mainstream medium.

6:13:27 PM    comment   

Yes, it's the first Western Civilization Smackdown!

Number of paragraphs in Wikipedia entry:

John Keats: 7
The Matrix: 62

It's over, folks! Cult Sci-Fi Flick Starring Keanu Reeves does some serious whoop-ass on Consumptive Romantic Poet Who Writes Odes!

6:12:57 PM    comment   

Unlikely bedfellows Pat Schroeder and Bob Barr team up to make a case against Google Print in an op-ed in the Washington Times today. The piece is a response to Google CEO Eric Schmidt's recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, the Schroeder/Barr article is as shrill as Schmidt's was self-righteous. At one point, they write, "Not only is Google trying to rewrite copyright law, it is also crushing creativity. If publishers and authors have to spend all their time policing Google for works they have already written, it is hard to create more." That's silly.

But Schroeder/Barr do raise issues that lie at the heart of how we'll think about the ownership of creative work in a world where all that work can be stored in a database operated by one, or a few, profit-making companies:

Our laws say if you wish to copy someone's work, you must get their permission. Google wants to trash that ...

Authors may be the first targets in Google's drive to make the intellectual property of others a cost-free inventory for delivery of its ad content, but we will hardly be the last. Media companies, engineering firms, software designers, architects, scientists, manufacturers, entertainers and professional services firms all produce products that could easily be considered for "fair use" by Google.

Google envisions a world in which all content is free; and of course, it controls the portal through which Internet user's [sic] access that content. It would completely devalue everyone else's property and massively increase the value of its own.

Google's moving forward with its plan to scan copyrighted works into its database without the permission of the copyright owners. Whether you're in favor of that or against it, it's worth pausing a moment to ask where exactly all of this is headed.

6:12:12 PM    comment   

An addendum to that last post: Google Print doesn't just raise complicated issues regarding ownership, compensation and copyright. It also provokes tricky questions about how content and form will be influenced over the longer run. At what point does a writer stop writing for the reader and start writing for the scanner?

6:11:41 PM    comment   

Now, phones aren't wonderful input devices - at least for 2000 word articles. They're not bad for text messages (or even a paragraph now and then), but there's nothing like a full sized keyboard and monitor to create documents. So I'd like to tell you about my computing environment, and give you an opportunity to think about the future of office productivity.

I'm sorry to admit my personal computer usage is a tad different than most folks. I don't have just one computer, I have about 5. Why? I like to keep up with where the industry's headed. I own a couple Macintoshes (everyone should), a SunRay, an Ultra 20 (dual booting Solaris/Debian), and a tiny travel laptop (Solaris/Windows), and of course, I'm typing this on a fancy (and hot) Ferrari Acer Solaris laptop.

Although that probably sounds like an embarassment of riches, it actually creates a few problems. I solved the cross platform office productivity problem a while back, running StarOffice/OpenOffice.org (granted, NeoOffice/J on my Mac), Firefox, Java and Thunderbird across all the platforms. I'm quite happy and productive. Interacting with PC users is no problem at all.

But I do run into problems, given my refusal to run a server in my home. Yes, I refuse to run a server. I know it's heresy for someone in my position (especially someone with 5+ desktops), but my view is regular users shouldn't run servers in their homes. Nor should everyday citizens run power generators, except when they live off grid. And given that I live on a grid, I let Yahoo! and Google and eBay and Sun and OpenTable run servers on my behalf. They do it far, far better than I (granted, that isn't a high bar).

But here's an interesting user problem, which should put what Sun announced today into context, and give you some insight into where we see the future of office productivity.

First, a member of my family gets a Microsoft Word document from her sister. This family member doesn't own MS Word, so she sends the document to me to revise on her behalf, and return via email.

I receive the document, convert from Microsoft's .doc to StarOffice's ODF format, edit, and save. To my local drive. On my fancy Ferrari laptop. Ooops. Why ooops?

Because then I get on a plane, and take a 6 hour flight to go visit customers, without my Ferrari laptop (I don't travel with it - I travel with the tiny one). When I land, my family member calls to tell me she needs the document sent immediately. Uh oh.

Do I ask my neighbor to give her the emergency key? Do I walk her through navigating boot partitions? No no no. What do I really want? Hold that thought.

The remarkable thing about office productivity is the breadth of functionality covered by products like OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office. Sadly, none of us uses more than 10% of the feature set - and yet none of us uses the same 10%. That certainly complicates migrating users. But there are a couple exceptions to the rule.

There are two features every Office user relies upon - neither of which have experienced much by way of innovation over the past decade, and both of which lend themselves well to solving the problem I outline above - a derivative of which has been experienced by every journalist on the planet. As I wrote a week or so ago, building a user base isn't about rewriting functionality that works well today, it's about identifying efficiencies and differentiation, and innovating to create value for consumers.

The two features every single user needs are: Save, and Open. So wouldn't it be interesting if rather than exploring your local file system on your local PC, the Save and Open panels simply looked to a network account on Sun's Grid? Shareable like any of the mainstream photo services are today? Or how about saving to that 2.5Gb allowance Google gave you in your GMail account? And wouldn't it be great if you could save to ODF, or translate to Microsoft Word, or generate a podcast or mp3 file - on the fly? From within any app?

That would certainly put into question why you'd want to shell out $500 for Microsoft's Office 12 when OpenOffice.org was free, cross platform, more innovative, and just more for your money. And enabled by the biggest names on the internet.

And the best part is Sun's Grid and Star or OpenOffice don't have to be rewritten - they just need to learn some very simple new tricks. And as one of the internet's brightest minds said last year around this time, simplicity is an awfully powerful weapon.

[Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog]
6:11:14 PM    comment   

I’m a bit short of time, so I’ll keep my comments brief. But I have to echo James about the just-announced first phase of the Amsterdam municipal fibre network. They are creating an open “layer 1” fiber-optical network, with a diversified ownership model, low cost of deployment, and no public subsidy. This has more significance than meets the eye at first look, since muni network announcements are ten a penny these days.

I’ll chop out the tedious logic (and the effort of constructing an argument) and jump straight to the conclusions:

• The natural unit of purchase of connectivity is not necesarily the household. I see it polarising upwards around the municipal subdivision, and downwards around the devices tethered to a given access network. Application-level price discrimination disappears at one extreme, and is embedded in the form factor of the access device at the other. In response to James’s musing on the privatized market structure, I would only add that the failure was to make it easy for users to co-ordinate in their purchase decisions. We manage it for garbage collection and roof maintenance, but somehow struggle when it comes to telecom.

• The only escape routes from the paradox of the best network are (i) out-distribute the other guy by having a network that reaches places and offers capacity that the others cannot match. Verizon Wireless is following this in the USA, for example, offering speed and coverage the others can’t rival; (ii) move to a new ownership structure that better aligns user and network owner interests. OPLANs are an example, as are vertically integrated muni nets, mesh nets, user-built nets, etc; (iii) Get a politicaly-mandated monopoly/duopoly. This is the Baby Bell approach. Sustainability of this strategy remains in doubt.

• Telcos that divide connectivity from service, by design or through regulation, are in a better position to survive. I think BT will still be around in 30 years, and they’ll bless the day that the regulator forced their access division into being, and wish they hadn’t voluntarily gone further. But they’ve got to get leaner and meaner to compete against upstarts without legacy pension promises, union rules and wannabe media company distractions. Dig deep into your engineering, project management and finance talent and you’ll live to see another day.

• You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. It only takes one Napster to make people see that the music and the disc were separable. It only takes one Amsterdam to succeed to blow away the “it doesn’t work” argument. Bit haulage and application service are equally separable and economically viable independently.

If you’re ever invited to a funeral for a tired and expired telco, I suggest bringing some tulips to lay on the grave. Just don’t grin too much, folk will get suspicious.

6:09:32 PM    comment   

The Indian mobile subscriber base continues to grow and reached about 64.4 million in September from about 42.4 million a year ago. The compounded annual growth rate of mobile subscriber base has been 89.5% over the past five years. However, will the current growth rate continue and if so is the target we have set for ourselves possible?

6:07:12 PM    comment   

(InfoWorld) - Google Inc. has removed the beta, or test, tag from the consumer and enterprise versions of its Google Desktop 2 application for indexing and finding information stored in PCs, the Mountain View, California company said Thursday.

5:51:22 PM    comment   

Business 2.0: The second coming of Microsoft Mobile

5:50:37 PM    comment   

Another Bang & Olufsen audio system that is, per usual, extremely stylish and easy to look at. The Beo4 is a CD player, FM radio and has an SD slot. If you'd like DAB radio, you can get it factory fitted as an option. B&O says this is the first audio system of its kind to be able to record music from a radio or CD to the SD without a computer (though I think there's a MD player somewhere that can do it). You'll need to supply equally stylish speakers (might they suggest the BeoSound 3 speakers?) and it comes with a floor, table and wall stand. The coolest feature is the front glass door, which opens when you wave a hand in front of it to show the operation panel and CD loader. You can pick this baby up in December for a mere $2,750.

5:48:26 PM    comment   

The Beolab 4 loudspeaker by B&O includes built-in amplifier and proprietary acoustic technologies (B&O love their proprietary stuff). These are also active speakers, so the amplifier is encased in the cabinet. And because they're small, they're perfect for either a home theatre situation (I'd use them as rear speakers. Or, with their dedicated PC mode, you can hook up to your computer or MP3 player anytime to make them more portable. Placement options are also pretty diverse — and with the prices B&O charge, you better have options. Hang them from the ceiling, put them on the wall, floor or any table and you'll also have a choice of cloth covers in red, blue black and charcoal gray. Get them in December for $1,200 a pair.

5:47:38 PM    comment   

Savacor Inc. is betting that you have congestive heart failure and that you want to be able to keep control of it digitally. So they bought up every last Handspring Visor from the junkyard they could find and slapped their software onto them. The result is the HeartPOD, a system designed to help monitor the patient via a sensor implated into the heart and an old-skool Palm. Currently it's still in trials and testing but could one day be available to all heart failure patients who need constant monitoring.

HeartPOD [MegaGadget]

5:46:53 PM    comment