Microsoft opening up on the Web

On the PC, Microsoft may not be writing every program that people use, but by controlling the operating system, the company has maintained a dominant position.

The company is in the early stages of trying to carve out a similar role on the Internet. To do that, Microsoft is not just branching out, but also reaching out to make itself more compatible with rivals.

"When you talk to people who are heavy Internet users, they don't all use just one service from one company," Microsoft corporate vice president Chris Jones said in an interview this week. "They end up using a smattering of services."

For sure, Microsoft would like to have people use its Web mail service, its instant-messaging software and its blog software, but what it wants most is to ensure that it has some central role for the vast majority of Web surfers.

"When you talk to people who are heavy Internet users, they don't all use just one service from one company. They end up using a smattering of services."

--Chris Jones, Microsoft corporate vice president

Of course, Microsoft is not alone in this pursuit. Google and Yahoo, and potentially others, also covet such a role. And in many cases, rivals have the early lead.

Microsoft is trying to strike back by building on its strength--Windows. While its first products were browser-based services and largely a rebranding of existing MSN products, the company's latest products are desktop programs. They are also more open. Windows Live Mail, for example, works particularly well with a Windows Live Hotmail account, but also can be used with other Web mail services.

Directions on Microsoft analyst Matt Rosoff said he expects this to become a model for Microsoft as time goes on. "I don't think we've seen anywhere close to the end of these," he said. (Rosoff is also a writer for the CNET blog network.)

Microsoft's newfound openness is evident in several other pieces of the company's strategy.

For those who do like the Windows Live services on the Web, the company is making sure they are accessible from non-Microsoft devices as well. The company recently struck a deal with Nokia to make Microsoft services accessible from its smart phones.

And as it tries to take on Adobe's ubiquitous Flash with its Silverlight platform for Web developers, Microsoft is again hoping to be seen as open, announcing this week that it will add support for Linux, in addition to Windows and the Mac.

The idea is that, at some point along the way to the Internet, Microsoft--and therefore its ad engine--touch nearly everyone. Of course, this is a bit harder than it has been on the desktop side.

In some cases, Microsoft is hoping that it can move into markets where it is not already a strong player, largely by aggregating the efforts of others. Social networking is one area where the company has discussed such a role.

Jones again hinted at this, saying that in the real world he has many different social networks and that he expects the same to be true on the Internet. "I'll probably be involved in many and what I'll want to do is make it really easy to stay in touch with all of them," he said. "And so how can we build software services that help?"

In some cases, Microsoft is also looking to link its existing tools with the social networks, such as a deal with Bebo to use Microsoft's contacts and instant-messaging technologies. The contacts part of the arrangement means that on Bebo there will be a secure way for Windows Live users to bring their contacts over to the social network. That contrasts with many social-network sites that just ask for your e-mail account name and password.

Aiming to provide more of the basics
Beyond such one-off deals, Microsoft is eyeing a role at providing some more basic services, such as sharing and accessing files. Windows Live Photo Gallery, a Windows application that went into public beta testing this week, is an example of a starting point for photo storage, but Microsoft has its sights set higher.

"Over time you'd like to have the service so that all your photos were available from any device, not just the ones you put in your photo album, and that it was easy to have those things backed up, to have them with the resolution you want, and then to have very collaborative experiences with pictures," Jones said.

"So, that you can see with photos we've taken a big step in this release of Windows Live, but we've got more to do."

The same goes for file sharing, he said. "We have a cloud-based way to do file sharing called SkyDrive, and then we have a peer-to-peer based way to do it called FolderShare," Jones said. "Well, over time it might make sense for us to really start to make that experience be seamless so you could get to all your files from anywhere."

Those two are just the first pieces in what Microsoft hopes will be an entire Live infrastructure that developers can write on top of, much the way they write programs that run on top of Windows today. It's a notion that some have dubbed a "cloud OS."

Such services are going to take massive amounts of storage space, which Microsoft also believes will eventually lead to a battle between only a few large companies for many of these core infrastructure pieces.

But as it pursues these different strategies, clashes among different parts of Microsoft seem inevitable. Silverlight, the Windows Live services team and the Live infrastructure group are all trying to be Web platforms of one sort or another.

And even the browser is a tough one for Microsoft. The company doesn't want to lose potential users of its services by not supporting Firefox, but Internet Explorer market share helps strengthen Windows.

"It gets to 'What is the goal of Windows Live?'" Rosoff said. "You want the most audience for the services, but you want to maintain the importance of Windows, and Internet Explorer is a part of Windows. There are some conflicts with the entire online services strategy," Rosoff said.

But internal conflict is part of Microsoft's way of doing business. Rosoff notes that the Windows Media Center, Xbox and Internet TV groups all are aiming to be the center of the digital living room.

"To some degree that's the way Microsoft has always worked," Rosoff said. "They've always allowed technology to compete and not necessarily picked a winner."

[clpdan]

Who Cares What Microsoft is doing

Microsoft has had years to earn my trust. I just don't buy what they do anymore. They over promise and under deliver. I am done with MS products and don't trust that they EVER do anything with the customer in mind. It is all about THEM. Silverlight will be on all platforms...until Microsoft has dominance, then they'll pull the plug from non-Windows platforms. I don't trust them and never will.

[Sumatra-Bosch]

Open Like a Bear Trap

Everything MSFT says or does must be filtered through its history of criminal deception, infringement, extortionate business practices and pathological mendacity. You can invite Hannibal Lector to dinner but you have to be careful. This scheme is like any other MSFT tie-in/lock-in campaign designed to destroy or neutralize competitors and lock consumers into Windows. On the web, though, the only choke points it will get its hands on are ones that are given to it.

[jerrybrace]

Open enough to not be totally ignored.

It's not truely cross-platform if the tools to create the content
aren't. Sure the plug-in works on Windows, Mac and Linux - but
the development tools are Windows only. I'll be sticking to Flash
development. The majority of people who I know that do web
development of this kind use Flash on Macs - they're not going to
go the PC route. I don't see this technology going far.

[rcrusoe]

(We) want to maintain the importance of Windows

and that is getting harder and harder to do every day because as web apps, etc. become more mature (and popular) the operating system you run becomes less and less important.

It won't be too many years before the average user won't know or care what operating system his pc/terminal/tv/whatever is running. And that scares Microsoft.

Because, when that happens, the name Microsoft won't mean any more to the average user than the name WindRiver would today.

[Millerboy]

It's Official: Apple is the New Microsoft

Don't be so hard on Microsoft or Apple.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136949-c,companynews/article.html

[ncalishome]

Maybe missing the point?

My company does a ton of Flash and Flex development and I don't ever see us switching to Silverlight but I think a lot of the critisism misses the point.

The point as I see it: Microsoft has a lot of very happy, very dedicated .NET developers who will absolutely jump at the opportunity to develop this type of rich cross-platform content. Microsoft has great tools for developers and from what I have read Silverlight will make it pretty painless for .NET developers to deploy sophisticated rich Internet applications using what the already know and resources they already have.

That said, I think the Flash IDE is pretty terrible for coding, a point largely missed because most Flash developers are not coders. My company is very lucky to have a couple talented ActionScript programmers but trying to find new top-end talent is very hard, even in the SF bay area.

Flex is alright in my humble opinion but I think Adobe has a lot of work to do to close their own gaps and make Flash/Flex really shine for companies with hardcore development needs. Will Apollo do this? I don't know as I haven't had much time to research, but somehow I doubt it.

I'm keenly interested to see what will come of Silverlight because there is a lot of real programming talent that are already geared to do the work. I do hope Microsoft continues to support this as cross-platform, but I think they will since that'll be a primary reason why .NET developers will be using it to begin with.

I think Silverlight is a lot less about locking people into Windows as it is about letting current Windows developers expand their presence into other platforms and attracting new developers with Visual Studio. I use Eclipse and program mostly LAMP but from what I've seen and heard from friends is that Visual Studio is pretty much cream of the crop when it comes to really shiny, really integrated end-to-end developement.

[mxrss]

Content Does Not Lie

Well most of the time anyway, video files and other crap can lie, but blogs and stuff lie about thier content, google has finally goten rid of thier bug with links (read French Military Victories) but if its text based and it has text that describes it, then it can not lie.

I like the web in where people index data, not machines. Tim Berners Lee is on to something there.

- Mike

[Maccess]

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish Part II

With this new standards embrace come the stealthy insertions of SilverLight and Microsoft's new photo format.

[fastdodge]

Open Like ActiveX...

Just more M$ BS. Open means open. and Standard ? Standardize.
Can anyone explain how you configuration control 7 different
versions of the same operating system? I just love Vista! I want my
computer to talk to Microsoft all the time too. Just one more step
to M$ version of "trusted computing".

Keep up the good work.

Les