From: "John Beamish" 

Interesting piece -- even went to Scoble's site to read the original which
you can find here:
http://scobleizer.com/2007/03/16/microsoft-tells-mvps-were-in-it-to-win-really/

What was more interesting, to me at least, were the comments to the Times article.

Quick summary of comments "just turned Beryl on.  Ubuntu rocks",
"tried Vista ... sucked, went back to XP", "you only have to
look at iTunes, Firefox".  One person even suggested going to
www.live.com and entering "search" to see what comes back (well,
until recently, if tried that on Google the first link was search.msn.com

There's a common thread there:  These people aren't differentiating between
the OS from MS and the internet offering from MS.  It may be a deliberate
strategy on the part of MS to *not* disambiguate between the OS and the
internet offering and, if that's the case, then no matter how good the
internet offering is, it will always be impacted by perceived failings of
the current OS.

OTOH, if MS _is_ trying to differentiate between the two then it's doing a
poor job of it to the general public.

Finally, I think it's somewhat premature to judge MS's Live efforts.  At
the time Google came out, most of us were using AltaVista (I still go back
there at times because I like the ability to compose complex boolean
searches).  Google trumped AltaVista because of its -- then new -- page
ranking algorithm and, I suppose, because of its clean interface.  While
Google does have a bunch of ancillary products, it's the revenues from
AdSense that keep the company going.  While MS does have a bunch of
ancillary products, it's the revenues from OS and Office that keep that
company going.

For Google, the onine word processor, spreadsheet, etc. will never be a
prime revenue source; for MS, the online ad-based revenues will never be a
prime revenue source.  In both cases, I'm sure, they will be non-trivial
amounts (I would love to have a business that got 0.01% of either of those
non-prime revenue figures) but in a number of business operations, you
aren't in a particular line to be the number 1, you're in a particular line
to have a broad presence.

And, btw, getting back to the comments posted to the comments on the Times
website:  I'm using iTunes (it's a pig on resources) and I won't use
Firefox -- even though V does -- because it's just too slow; and Ubuntu is
nice -- but it won't support MS Project natively -- and using MS Project is
how I make my living.




On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 09:30:09 -0400, Rich Gauszka  wrote:

> "The words are empty," Scoble responded. "Microsoft's
internet execution
> sucks (on the whole). Its search sucks. Its advertising sucks. If that's
> 'in
> it to win', then I don't get it."
>
> http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/ar
ticle1529988.ece

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