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Microsoft discovers an elephant in its living room

Yikes! Bill Gates has written one of his memos, this time acknowledging that web services (aka "Web 2.0") are a big deal. I thought we all agreed not to tell him?[Link]

As with previous memos, Microsoft is widely perceived to be late to the party. Mr Gates and Mr Ozzie have announced plans for Windows Live and Office Live, two products intended to become just the sort of free internet services that Web 2.0 is supposedly all about. But both are, in fact, little more than new names for Microsoft's existing offerings, and look feeble in comparison with services offered by its rivals.

This prompted yet another memo from Marc Benioff, the marketing-savvy boss of Salesforce.com, a leading proponent of the “software as a service” model. If Microsoft were serious about Web 2.0 and Microsoft Live, he suggested helpfully in an “internal” memo sent to the press, it should rename its traditional software “Microsoft Dead”. Web 2.0, he said, was not about old companies constrained by their legacy products but new firms such as, naturally, Salesforce.com, Writely, Numsum, Zimbra and Goffice. For his part, Zach Nelson of NetSuite, another software-as-a-service company, says he decided against writing a memo. Writing memos is cheap, he says, whereas “writing software is a whole lot harder”.

jon posted this at 8:57 AM
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