pull the other one

By Phil | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0)

A couple of weeks ago Richard MacManus posted his list of the best web companies and innovators of 2005. Richard drew a conceptual line in the sand between the davids and goliaths and awarded the overall bigCo award to Yahoo! for their savvy aquisitions during the course of the year (notably flickr, deli.icio.us and konfabulator) and their release of Yahoo 360 and other web services. Then he proceeded to award the runner-up web bigCo award to Microsoft. He writes:

“You may be surprised at the latter choice - Microsoft a Web company? But in 2005 Microsoft has embraced the Web as a development platform in a big way. In late June they announced RSS integration in Vista, the next Windows OS. Then in November came an extension to RSS called Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE). This was followed by The Live Era announcements - Windows Live and Office Live. Their catchphrase was ’software as a service’ and the release of so-called leaked documents by Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie confirmed that Microsoft is meeting the Web challenge head-on.”

Yes, I’m surprised at that choice. Let’s run over the accomplishments again, in slow motion:

  1. they announced RSS integration in the next version of their operating system, currently scheduled to arrive during 2006.
  2. they released a specification for making RSS bi-directional. No code mind you, just the spec.
  3. they announced a rebranding effort that would encapsulate many existing services and some new ones under a new ‘Live’ banner. (Read Kevin Burton’s analysis of live.com)
  4. they leaked some copy-written emails which were designed to let us know that Microsoft still has their eye on the ball.

I know that the pool of potential bigCos is very limited, but honestly, releasing a specification and turning the hand crank on the PR machine a couple of times doesn’t make Microsoft a web company.

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Topics: web things

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Comments

Was msn spaces a 2005 thing? That was an interesting platform for blogging/sharing, although that was really only an IE thing, Its ‘integration’ with MSN Messenger certainly seems to bring blogging to the mainstream.

I think maybe he should redefine ‘big company’ - and widen his pool of available candidates. Otherwise its just going to be Amazon, Google, MS and Yahoo trading places over and over again :)

Comment by S on 8 January, 2006 @ 6:06 am

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