Alec Saunders SquawkBox

I’ve had a little more time to digest the Microsoft Live announcements, read some of the comment from the blogosphere, and chat with some local industry people about their thoughts.  I think the funniest bit of commentary was Om Malik’s Microsoft: I Speak Web 2.0, in which he compared the announcements to a guy having a mid-life crisis: "A little nip-and-tuck, some hip-hop and a $500 haircut with highlights to hide the 40-odd summers."  A lot of people also noticed, as did Mary-Jo foley, the similarities to Microsoft’s defunct Hailstorm Strategy. 

The consensus seems to be that the story was a rebrand, and the only real news was the advertising based business model.   I hope there’s a lot more to it than that. 

I wonder about Microsoft’s brand strategy.  Before there was MSN, Windows, and Office, with a bunch of minor players in the background.  Now, Windows and Office are included in the Live brands, but MSN isn’t?  Some parts of Live are paid services, and some are advertising supported?  Some MSN assets (like Messenger) are becoming Live assets?

Following the 1995 Internet Day announcements it took the better part of a year to get the components announced that day rolled out.  Microsoft Live looks like it’s following the same path.  The components at www.live.com are really early… perhaps, heaven forbid, a little partially baked. The brand strategy is byzantine, which is bizarre since so much of this announcement was about rebranding.  So, perhaps we’re a year away from seeing the true potential of Microsoft Live.  And perhaps there’s a year to sort out the marketing mess too.

As an aside, Joel Spolsky muses in this posting that Microsoft’s marketing approach is incompatible with the Web 2.0 mantra of release early, release often.  It’s worth reading.  Joel is provocative, as always.

Heatley 2, Alfredsson 4, Havlat 4.  It was pretty one sided.  The Sens just dismantled the Buffalo defence putting goal after goal past Biron.  Tomorrow it will be Tampa Bay in Ottawa.  Hopefully the Sens have something left for that game, because the Lightning are going to be a much tougher team than the Sabres.

The normally very conservative Colby Cosh has written a delicious piece defending Jack Layton’s position that he will continue to try to work with the government on the NDP’s ethics reform package, protection for pensions and the environment and a renewed commitment to public health care.  Stephen Harper is trying to paint Layton as a sell-out, and Cosh is having none of it.  He writes "on the premise that a party leader cares most about the ideas for which his party stands, no position other than Layton’s is remotely practical".  And he concludes with:

I don’t think anyone would hold it against him for too long if he (Stephen Harper), like Layton, were to present the Liberals with a list of ideological policy demands. But maybe that’s the real question: do today’s Conservatives actually have a wish list? (One, I mean, beyond No Queer Weddings In My Backyard?) Harper, after all, ran tacitly for the Canadian Alliance leadership as the man who was willing to treat the party as a vehicle for ideas rather than as a professionalized cabal of jobhunters hoping to win an elaborate game of Red Vs. Blue. It seemed like a good idea to some of us at the time, but somewhere along the line Harper accepted the values of a national press corps capable of comprehending and covering politics only as a spectator sport.

Does anyone have a spare petard around to lend Stephen Harper?  Some hoisting is clearly called for…

My friend Jim Courtney, author of Musings of an Internet Marketing Consultant, is home recovering from AAA Surgery.  I’m glad to have made the shortlist on his convalescence blogroll, even if he does weed out the choice stuff I write about Canadian politics… Speedy recovery, Jim!

It was a busy day for Microsoft yesterday.  A number of threads are starting to pull together into a single piece of cloth.

• September 2nd: Microsoft acquires Teleo
• September 9th: Microsoft’s Web Platform Under Construction (from the PDC)
• September 20th: Microsoft Reorgs MSN into Platforms Group

And November 1, the MSN web services components are rebranded as the Windows Live platform. 

The unfinished nature of much of the work suggests a strong similarity to December 7th 1995, as many others have commented.  The fact that only Windows Live Mail, Live.com, Live Favorites, and Windows Live Safety Center are running really underscores that.  This is the easy stuff.  Who really needs another RSS reader at this point?  And the idea that we’re all creating massive personal indexes of favorites is so… 1995. Where are the tags? Apparently the demo of Live Messenger really rocked. It sounds like an early instantiation of the many ideas being discussed around Voice 2.0. I would have liked to have seen that, and I can hardly wait for the beta.

In a lot of ways this isn’t reminiscent of December 7th 1995 Internet Day, though.  At Internet Day, commitments were made to developers, and new APIs were rolled out.  That didn’t happen here.  True, Bill did talk about platforms.  And when asked whether data would come out of Microsoft apps as well as being aggregated into them, he said that there’s no difference between syndicating out and syndicating in.  It’s more than syndication which is needed, though, and I hope we see a lot more focus on the developer community.

I’m very hopeful, in fact.  In particular, a Microsoft choice to open the Live Messenger presence cloud and identity mechanisms to other applications would create amazing opportunities.