Microsoft has made a number of announcements in the last 24 hours that show it is not going to let the oncoming Google Office steal its thunder without a fight. It looks to me like the transformation of Microsoft into a Web 2.0 company is underway at this moment and is happening faster than many people expected. Redmond has announced that it is partnering with PHP commercialization firm Zend, it has released a free, lightweight accounting application integrated with online activities and it will be bringing the first version of Office Live out of beta in two weeks. A new cross vendor ad management service will allow customers to buy AdSense as well as Microsoft ads and there will be a new hosted CRM service. These are huge changes.
The company announced this morning a multi-year relationship with Israeli PHP company Zend Technologies. The collaboration will focus on making it easier for PHP developers to program against Windows Server 2003 and in the future Longhorn. This is important because it’s a clear signal of recognition that the company can’t use its market share to force developers to use its .NET platform. The partnership with Zend looks like a great move towards increased participation in the larger development ecosystem.
Yesterday Microsoft released a free downloadable accounting program called Office Accounting Express 2007. That software focuses on integrating with online sites like eBay, PayPal and Office Live. See for comparison Google’s partnership with Intuit.
Today it was announced that the first version of Office Live will come out of beta on the 14th of November. Office Live is a free service with premium services for small businesses. It includes online storage, webmail and calendaring. The highest level of premium service will cost a mere $40 per month for up to 50 users.
According to InfoWorld’s coverage, when Office Live comes out of beta, two new services will become available in beta stage: Office Live adManager and Office Live Business Contact Manager. AdManager will let customers purchase and manage ad campaigns on any ad platform including Google, Yahoo! and Ask as well as Microsoft’s own platform. The Business Contact Manager will be a hosted CRM service.
Got all that? Microsoft is partnering with an open source facilitator, releasing free rich internet applications, online storage, web mail, calendaring, hosted CRM and a non-walled garden ad campaign manager. The fight between Microsoft and Google is getting very interesting.
Microosft will eventually get its act together and than push with full force. It is important for those like google and others to really focus and get thier products in the main stream quickly.
Free Accounting software. Wow! That will hit at the bread and butter of Intuit where they’ve been fleecing people of $150 or more for basic accounting software and a forced upgrade every year.
Compiling PHP with Phalanger is another alternative to Zend. You get the best of both worlds, combining simple PHP with the performance of the CLR.
http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/V.....=Phalanger
Can this replace quicken?
Microsoft has a habit of discontinuing their free products once they get adopted or making them so restrictive that an upgrade is required eventually.
I wonder if this is yet another attempt to kill the competition (quicken/quickbooks) thru their usual anticompetitive kill the competition first then start charging strategy.
To do more advanced functions an upgrade to Office Accounting 2007 Professional will be needed.
Historically, the low end MS accounting products have not been the best.
I’ve been watching both MS’ and Google’s 2.0 offerings for a while, and I’m all but certain to predict that MS is going to win this round, hands down.
Google, while still a king of search, seems to not only be losing focus with the broad offerings they are releasing, but a majority of their efforts are stuck in the perpetual beta that they can’t seem to shake.
MS, on the other side, is a software powerhouse, and their latest Live offerings prove that more and more each day. Not only is everything integrated, but it’s easy to move from one offering to another in the same online space, and the learning curve is held to the bare minimum to get started.
On the GUI front, MS interfaces seem much more polished, friendly and inviting, while Google interfaces (with the strict exception of Earth from Keyhole and Picasa from Picasa), their interfaces seem stuck in the late 90’s GeoCities universe. Plain boxes and one-sided borders don’t invite people in to use it, and that leaves out the masses.
Add that Vista seems to be open for the ultimate integration with Live services, and you got a software/web juggernaut that makes for one powerful package.
Looks like MS is finally starting to take their gloves off.
There’s an interesting CNNMoney.com article titled “Microsoft’s big nightmare: free online apps”
http://money.cnn.com/magazines.....2006102307
Bold moves my Microsoft…The issue for them is to get out out once every 2-3 year release cycle mode and instead develop a more customer oriented, fast reacting organization. This is going to be a massive undertaking…I am not sure I see the leaders in place who can get this done…but let’s hope for the best.
Yesterday, a phrase came to mind, “Microsoft Web 2.0.” This came to mind while trying to describe some new Live Search features. Is anyone concerned that Microsoft is creating a separate Web 2.0 space? Maybe from a potential end-user perspective?
In other words, how successful or healthy is a homegrown version of web 2.0 for any company?
I’m impressed with the social implications of what appears to me as multi-headed dragons emerging from several caves (longhorn, office, live). But is it truly social if it comes from just a few urls?
My default search setting in IE7 stays with Google for now but Google will have to step it up. Have they taken their eye off the ball on this?
We’ve hosted our site with Office Live Beta.
We could build the site and deploy it in less time. Its great.
I’ve got to be honest with you, I’m secretly gunning that Microsoft reinvents and gets back up ahead in the game. It’s such an old dog but it’s going to be fun to see it compete.
Wow, can’t wait to try them out.
yeah, i mean Ms is not going to launch a full Office set (that until early next year was rumored as Live desktop) until not only Office 2007 is out, but until Vista and WM6.0 are finally out.
MSFT had it’s day in the sun and the odds are very much against Microsoft to be successful in trying to reinvent itself.
Microsoft was in denial for five years and $5 billion with Longhorn/Vista and now all of a sudden they have a late breaking epiphany and we have the transformation of Microsoft into a Web 2.0 company
Please cheerleaders…. it will take much more than this and what you say you post Marshall.
there is also their live search that will be on hand for all those users that sign up.
I am actually starting to tire of using google for search because of their constant changing of the search rules to stop the gaming seems to be devaluing the search results
Shame the Account Express is only available within the US - still not cool Microsoft.
Not sure about the Office Live stuff, but the free accounting product is the real deal. t’s clear they’ve been working on a bunch of this stuff for a while and it’s only now coming to fruition… and some of this stuff totally came out of left field…
http://sba2006.blogspot.com
Patricia, I agree with you. Its fun to watch and see how Microsoft will get back in the game.
They are the company we love to hate.
Although I’m secretly (well, not anymore) rooting for Google, I’m simply happy that someone will attempt to put up a credible challenge to its dominance. As a die-hard free-market proponent, I believe that the more competition there is, the more us the consumers will benefit. However, with Microsoft having wasted so much time, it’ll be interested just what else they will come up with in an attempt to dethrone Google.
testing
Web 2.0, a new cast of characters to team up against MS under the banner of open source, do good intent. Big companies protect their markets before they reinvent. Better to not attack directly, or too openly.
Hmm
“Got all that? Microsoft is partnering with an open source facilitator, releasing free rich internet applications, online storage, web mail, calendaring, hosted CRM and a non-walled garden ad campaign manager. The fight between Microsoft and Google is getting very interesting.”
Notice most of these are where Microsoft has been weak and has failed to some degree :
*PHP has kicked ASP’s butt
*Online storage they haven’t even been here yet
*Web Mail They have been quite successfull with hotmail but have to respond to Google
*Hosted CRM/Accounts - Intuit and Sage kisked their but in these markets
If they really are serious about web 2.0 where ire the Office 2.0 products like spreadsheeets, wordprocessing, slides et al .. ?
Unfortunately that would damage their existing Cash Cows, so I I don’t think they are embracing ‘Open Source’ or being ‘Web 2.0′.
The FastCGI plugin to IIS looks interesting for Ruby on Rails developers who want a Windows 2003 deployment option (like me). Now, if they can bundle a good ISAPI rewrite extension as well, you’ll likely see Rails on Windows as a good alternative to the *nix installations.
I’ve always thought Microsoft had a good business mind. IMHO Microsoft are just “doing their thing”, and if people want to call it web 2.0, they can. It’s business that happens to be in the tech industry, not technology that just happens to be in business.
Like what I say? Hate what I say? Speak to me about it: http://www.scribblehere.com/25
Microsoft embraces PHP on the same day Bob Barker announces his retirement? Is hell freezing over?
i downloaded office accounting express and was very impressed. i sell quite a bit on ebay and i think microsoft has hit the spot with its web 2.0 functionality for ebay sellers. i still need to try the other services in the accounting software. does anyone have feedback on what the paypal service is. btw, i noticed on their web site http://www.ideawins.com that they are alluding to something called ultimate challenge. anyone know what that is ?
This will make for a very interesting turn of events. Microsoft has been pre-occupied with ‘Long-in-the-Horn’ for the past century and suddenly they do an about face with the launch of web 2.0 apps.
I certainly hope they fulfill their goal of ‘lean and light’ vs the ‘heavy, bloated and leaking’ software thy have a reputation for delivering. Maybe this latest announcement will light a fire under Google’s butt to focus their efforts and put more thought into the overall usabiliy of their products.
That being said, I cant help but to think that nothing good will come of this if Mr. Softie does prevail. They have a long history and a deeply rooted culture of competing to not just win–but destry, then dropping the ball when the battle is won. Even if Google’s corporate mantra of ‘Do no Evil’ is all nothing but public relations fluff, there are at least a significant number of Googlers who truly care about developing useful products and not just winning.
Yeah for competition. Don’t forget that Microsoft also just release Windows Media Player 11 which includes some significant enhancements as well as bringing Windows Defender out of beta, stiffling one of the significant complaint areas against the OS - that it lacked in automatic security features (while at the same time accusing it of being monopolistic).
I’m a PHP advocate, but I didn’t expect this from MS…
Now if could only use their own version of Ubuntu
We use PHP. We like how software $$$ got shared among more people. However, whether you are MS, Google, etc.. when you start giving your eyeballs to their platform, you are eventually giving them the right to dictate what you do online.
I suggest continued innovation on the open-source platform. Its FREE SPEECH! Protect your business.
I downloaded office accounting express from http://www.ideawins.com. I used it to manage my eBay busienss that I was tracking in Excel - it was easy to do that. Now I can run my ebay biz from within Acct Express and also do invoicing with PayPal (and have nice looking invoices in Word - all from within Express). The price is hard to beat!. I wish they added more inventory functionality. All in all a nice surprise from M$. (maybe now I should remove the $). Small Businesses should give this a try…
Things like this are what shake my ability to hate Microsoft passionately. The cooperation with Zend could not have been seen coming, and it may herald a new era of cooperation between Microsoft and Open Source. I’ll still use Apache and Linux, though.