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enter search queries onto a personalized Windows Live home page.
People will also be able to add non-Web items, such as a corporate SharePoint server or recently opened documents, to the Windows Live home page. Irving also presented the Windows Live Safety Center, a free tool that lets customers check on the health of their PC and scan for and remove viruses.
Also included is an AJAX-based
There is also a Windows Live Messenger program that provides traditional instant messaging alongside some social networking features, such as the ability to view your circle of IM buddies. (Members have the right to say whether they want to be included in the viewable circle.)
In the demonstration, Irving showed how Windows Live Messenger offers the ability to make phone calls over the Internet, from a PC to a traditional phone.
Also for those who opt in, Microsoft has a new live business card that updates contact information online and on a PC any time that the information changes.
Some parts of the Windows Live software are in beta testing now, executives said. Others, like the new Messenger, should begin testing in December.
In the Office
The Office Live service is mostly targeted at small businesses, said Rajesh Jha, general manager of information worker services at Microsoft, who presented the demo of the service. He noted that 28 million of the world's 42 million businesses are companies with fewer than 10 employees.
Jha showed how small businesses like these can use Office online to set up Web sites with custom domain names and multiple e-mail addresses--all free. Initially, these sites will not carry ads, but Microsoft sees the feature as a revenue opportunity and expects it to eventually be ad-supported.
Another tool, called "Mojo," will enable a small group of users to work collaboratively on the same document--in the case of the demonstration, an Excel spreadsheet.
"We're always on the same page," Jha said. "This real-time service is going to be free."
He also showed some of the 22 applications that are part of the subscription service, including customer management tools and secure collaboration.
Office Live will be in invitation-only beta testing in the first quarter of next year, Jha said. That beta will also be limited to the U.S., he added.
More to come
Tuesday's announcement is more of a placeholder for other initiatives to come, Smith said. "I think part of why people look at this and say it looks sketchy is because it is. But it's a step in direction that they have to go in," he said.
Smith likened the announcement to Gates' Web call to action of a decade ago. "It's the beginning of a big change at the company that will take a long a time to see manifested in mainstream products," he said.
In the meantime, the new products help Microsoft better compete with online rivals. Although the traditional software industry is very profitable and well understood, online advertising is an important opportunity, Ozzie said. He praised Google for demonstrating some of the possibilities.
"Google is doing an amazing job of making that ad engine click on all eight cylinders," Ozzie said.
But he said that the industry has barely scratched the surface, pointing out that the market for online advertising could grow from $15 billion now to $150 billion by 2015.
CNET News.com's Mike Ricciuti contributed to this report.
See more CNET content tagged:
Bill Gates, David Smith, Microsoft Office Live, Microsoft Windows Live, Ray Ozzie
I am reminded of a quote "In a fight between a grizzly bear and an alligator, the terrain determines the winner". Meaning, each company has its strength and position in the market. The company that crosses over to fight on the others turf is likely to lose...but probably not die. These giants are too strong and too smart to battle to the death over any one market. It will be a battle for first place versus second place, with each making money in its own way.
My guess is this will be a battle of the titans fought on many different fronts for a very long time...like decades. This is great for customers and users. Innovation will flourish and prices will decline. Competition is a great thing.
Microsoft has already entered the battle for Search supremacy. MSN Search is awesome. In fact, it is hard to pick a winner in terms of relevance of results for any particular search. Internal to Microsoft we have a search site that simultaneously sends a search query to MSN Search and Google, and displays the results side by side. Internal users vote on which results were more relevant. This feedback helps us tweak the ranking and relevance algorithm. I was director of engineering at AltaVista so I have a real appreciation for search. I have got to tell you that I think MSN Search is equal to, or better than Google. Now it is a matter of gaining user market share and building out the Ad Network revenue model.
I wrote a blog today on this subject and how I think it will play out. See http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/11/microsoft_vs_go.html
It is as if they each want to say "aha, we are beating the competition!" But, in order to do that they each have to purposefully jump from their core businesses into the other's. It is just weird.
competition of ALL tech companies hands down. You work for a
bad company and can't admit it.
I am a consumer not connected to Microsoft or Google. I like working with Microsoft products. But when I search online, I use Google to save time simply because Google shows the most relevant results most of the time.
This is by experience. In the wild! Not in some control group or laboratory experiments organized by people connected to Microsoft.
However, when it comes to depth of search and the number of indexed web-pages I see that MSN is nowhere close to Google. You can see this typically in image searches. Google tends to deliver images across a broad spectrum associated with the keyword(s) whereas MSN mostly delivers only images associated to the most popular interpretation of the keyword(s).
MSN search is also lacking heavily in the number of images in its index. A Google image search for "MSN" returned around 2,630,000 results whereas the same on MSN returned only 148,795 results, nearly 17 times lesser.
If MSN search is awesome, then Google search is simply amazing. You can blog all night on how awesome MSN search is, but the fact is it has a lot of catching up to do both in sheer size and scale, if it is to be comparable to Google.
Rebranding some MSN stuff and adding layers of subscription based services is not going to get MSFT very far.
http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com
Book will send out updates to one's Card when updated. Microsoft
are inventing things all over again, lets try something 'New'.
Me too, me too.
Too bad it looks just like Google Home, including the google-esque name/beta logo.
following the 'known' business model of canned software.
Yikes. Do people really want this? Not likely. This is about
Microsoft putting the conditions in place to generate more
income. Trouble is, it doesn't offer the consumer any value, as
far as I can see. The consumer and the small business will be
the launch pad for this new direction and soon it will be
universal. When I imagine the future I don't see the myriad of
advertising that will be the norm for this kind of business plan.
J
There is certainly an argument to re-assess distributed systems, but does anyone really think it prudent to place the responsibility for the security of company data with an "online" service like Mojo?
I can just hear Data Security groups saying "I don't think so." when someone from Marketing asks if would be okay to...."
MicroSofts success in this space will be marginal at best - there are just too many security issues.
Tom
- MS CANT innovate
- by corvax November 6, 2005 7:17 AM PST
- Microsoft is screwed they cant REALLY offer full webbased services because if they did you could use them from any platform using any browser that includes linux unix osx etc . so instead they offer crappy watereddown *extras* microsoft cant innovate because it will ruin their way of locking people into to their operating system and their office products.So now google is free to innovate and lead the way especially since they are a proponent of open source and have allied themselves with sun/openoffice
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