nan | 楠木

It’s no secret that Microsoft has not been very successful in it’s consumer web products. Hotmail is a dinosaur of a product. The MSN portal is tiny compared to Yahoo! sites. Their only strong product is Messenger, and only by the virtue of this could their blog/personal website offering Spaces get any traction (personally I hate Spaces – the only attractiveness it poses whatsoever is the automatic update feature on Messenger).

Now they’ve rebranded everything under Windows Live, or something like that. I was prompted today for an automatic download of Messenger 8.5, which I accepted, and while the installation was doing its thing I saw the promotion for their other Live services. I was interested in Photo Gallery, because my Flickr (paid) account is blocked in China and Google Picasa only offers very basic features. However when I clicked more info, there was only a single page with some text descriptions. No demos, links, whatsoever. I wasn’t going to install some 15MB software that I hadn’t even seen one snapshot or detailed explanation.

And that’s the problem with Windows Live, or whatever it’s called. It’s a typical half-finished product, the site organization is totally messed up (seriously, I had trouble finding how to download Live Writer last time) and the products are not laid out in a clear and understandable format. I’ll give MS credit that some of the products are genuinely of some use (Messenger and Live Writer being two solid programs that I use daily), but MS clearly has no idea how web2.0 works. People bash Yahoo! for not having an integrated web strategy, but just look at MS – compared to MS Yahoo! seems to be the pillar of excellence in web2.0.

People love comparing Apple and MS, and for once I’ll do that comparison too. When Bill Gates did a funny and very likable keynote at CES, I had trouble finding the video. When Steve Jobs does as much as whisper a moan, you’ll find it at Apple.com, right there for you to stream/download and watch. In the age of web2.0, your content need to be flexible, responsive and pervasively available for consumption, in a clear and easy to pick up format. MS just lacks the web savvy to make its products so.

And until then, even real gems from MS will have a hard time getting noticed.