Last Thursday night I joined a small group apparently hand-picked by the irrepressible Frank Arrigo at Ninemsn offices in Sydney for a demonstration of the latest raft of upgrades in the Windows Live Beta by Phil Holden who flew in from Redmond to do a few of these sessions.
I think I was the only non-geek in the room so I felt both a little intimidated and privileged as well.
These are exciting times. The notion of a web 2.0 is still controversial but there's no doubting that we live in the midst (or shadow) of a massive dogfight between Google, Microsoft and Yahoo for competitive advantage in a process that is redefining the way we think about and more importantly use the Internet.
Google's purchase of Writely.com yesterday is just the latest development in this battle:
Not content with search, advertising, messaging and email, web giant Google has opened a new front in its war against Microsoft for the eyeballs of the world with plans to roll out a free web-based word processor after acquiring a Web 2.0 company called Upstartle. The move could allow Google to take Microsoft’s US$11.5bn Office business in the flank.
There is a huge gap at the moment between early adoptors and the average internet user with the non-online world a distant third.
Just about everyone I know uses the Internet a lot, very few people I know use RSS or are actively involved in blogging as either produsers or just readers. Yet that there is no denying this will change and that change will come with a rush.
There are over 500,000 beta users of WIndows Live (or Messenger 8.0, I'm not sure which) at the moment and they will scale that to a million soon. So my point is that even though only a fraction of the population are aware of much of what is happening at the edges - the total number of users is already significant.
And with three behemoths like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft cashed up and desperate for advantage I can't believe that there isn't a lot of momentum building behind this stuff.
In addition, as they impinge in other markets like media and telecommunications you can only expect some global giants in this area to get more involved in Web 2.0 plays as well.
And we can expect the pace of change to just get faster.
Apparently Microsoft is moving towards quarterly upgrades on their Windows Live suite of services which includes search, rss readers, mail, messenging, talk, blogs, social networking, trading (expo) and more.
Microsoft is aiming to be best of breed in as many of these as possible and to get some stickiness by allowing people to use their contacts across all these services and through consistency of UI etc.
I must say Windows Live all looks like good stuff to me and I generally like the look and feel of it.
It doesn't seem to me that any of this stuff is going to get hordes of existing gmail or yahoo users to switch to WIndows Live - yet that's probably not the point.
Microsoft still has the vast majority of desktops if they can provide a reasonable equivalent suite of services through WIndows Live they can prevent or at least stem market share loss while monetizing that share through advertising and online service upgrades etc.
I'll write more about Windows Live after I've played around with it some more and done some more comparisons with Google and Yahoo offerings.
But - one last point - does Telstra understand what's happening here. I know a lot of people who use Skype but its still little used in the general population. But once people start buying PCs, laptops, wireless homephones, PDAs etc with Windows Live Talk bundled with it and ready it to go then well if you've got Telstra shares I'd be looking hard at the possible consequences.
Thanks again Frank - very stimulating evening.
Tags: Windows Live; Microsoft; Frank Arrigo; Web 2.0; Telstra
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