6:49 AM - (no subject)
I woke up early with the inability to get back to sleep. Caryn is traveling right now and I'm stuck with nothing to do, very tired, and deciding how to spend my day.
I read this article about the lack of profits at Microsoft in terms of their online division. I don't believe Microsoft can turn things around with their "do everything" mentality. They need one good product to attract users to their other properties. Sadly, hotmail is their best weapon now. I think they could be competative with search provided they expand their search results and stop optimizing for their own partners (and their own) products. Nothing is more annoying that to search for linux or bsd and get a Windows ad. The BSD results are a joke. Searching for data on integrating windows and mac os is even bad. It's clear they are either filtering or have a very small index of the web. It's also possible that they manually add entries and their own stuff comes first.
I think there is too much competition online. Most of the novelty of the web has worn off for people. It's become a shopping and news source and less of a peer to peer communication medium. I think this is in part to the younger generation shunning the internet in favor of proprietary cell phone messaging. Why have something for free when you can pay per message. Microsoft will never be amazon.com and they already partnered with NBC. Perhaps they need to get a better arrangement with NBC. The other big pull these days is social networking and sharing pictures. I think picture sharing sites are somewhat a fad. It takes energy to share photos and eventually apple and microsoft will automate the process with their own software. That is an angle for them I guess. Make a .Mac (mobile me) style photo gallery service for free built into windows live properties + a local client. Social networking is interesting, but I think long term that blogging and sites like facebook will die out. Facebook will be replaced by something else just as myspace has lost momentum. It will happen eventually. I give credit to facebook for innovating in many ways, but as they change the site users will leave. It's a catch-22. Essentially sites like google have not changed in years. They only add services. Facebook needs to follow that model not to alienate users.
In my opinion, microsoft should give up on an online revenue directly and instead partner with other companies in to integration with windows. They still have a monopoly lock on their OS and office suites that can be leveraged for a few years yet.
From an open source perspective, we need to de-thrown Microsoft Office and make an idiot proof desktop. I'm not interested in working on office suites.