srw

MSFT’s Next Online Business Chief Will Need a Compass, and a Clue, in New Media

As an obvious step, Microsoft must release an offline/online docs & spreadsheets in silverlight technology (I am not talking about * live), and if they can release it as open source at codeplex they will kill google docs & spreadsheets in a blink and show some virtual strength.

7 Reasons You Can't Kill Microsoft

On the mobile side Microsoft still has a lot of space to grow. Currently it has a low market share of ~12% but windows mobile it's not that bad.

Comparing it with other alternatives like Blackberry, Symbian based and Mac OS X based (iPhone) I can say that from a developer & business perspective Microsoft is in a better position. iPhone SDK is promising but Apple (Steve Jobs?) try to kick developers instead of attracting them, they ask for paying $ 99 & $ 299 for entering the program... Symbian development is slow and Blackberry is so propietary. Google came up with Android but it's not a really open platform and you must develop in Java.

IMHO Apple can be a real competitor if they finally understand that developers are partners. Also somebody can build a Linux based platform with a really nice GUI, and good and fast developers tools.

Microsoft/Yahoo Drama and Investing in Google

The sad thing about Microsoft is that they can't even build (from a technical perspective) a copycat version of Google adwords/analytics. Looking at adcenter and adcenter analytics you quickly realize that MS has not idea about how to build a web application!

If I were Microsoft, I would build a keyword exchange market instead of another adwords/overture/adcen... system, so you can empower many ad networks in one place. It can work like a stock exchange market.