Christmas Chaos

By Jerry Pournelle

November 28, 2005

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Column 303 (Continued from the Previous Week)

Microsoft Live

On November 1, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates threw a fancy press party in San Francisco to announce the coming out of Microsoft Live. Microsoft Live encompasses Windows Live and Microsoft Office Live. There's also Xbox Live.

Live will offer online services free to users of Microsoft products. There will be advertisements, which is how Microsoft will generate revenue to cover costs and profits. You can get a sort of preview at http://ideas.live.com, and it's certainly worth going over to have a look. You'll probably want to play with the beta of live.com, and there's other interesting stuff. It's very much beta, but it's a promise of a lot more to come. So far there's not much advertising, but just you wait.

For the story of the announcement, see the VAR Business report, and note the source. Interest in Microsoft Live goes well beyond the software developer community.

It's early days yet, but it's interesting to speculate on just what Microsoft has in mind.

First and foremost, of course, Microsoft wants to be sure users do not abandon the Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office cash cows for the fairy gold offered in the Google/Sun press conference October 4. The conference was anticipated as the declaration of war on Office. This is Microsoft's answer—an answer clearly prepared well in advance of the attack.

As we said earlier in this column, everyone smells blood in the water: There's money in providing free services in exchange for bringing eyeballs to a screen with advertising, and Microsoft doesn't intend to be left out, especially since there's not a lot of rapid high-growth potential left in the small computer market. Most computer users have machines, and those machines are Good Enough for what they want to do with them.

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