Microsoft’s much touted Microsoft Office Live went into a live beta according to Microsoft this morning!
The free service it provides seems reasonable enough - you get your domain name, 5 email accounts, web stats and design tools. However the next two levels up don’t give much more (extra email accounts, and some online workspace is essentially it) but the price goes up to $29.95 per month! That seems like a big jump for not that much extra functionality.
The biggest issue I see with Office Live though is the branding - are they trying to fool consumers into thinking this is some form of online Microsoft Office? You just know some people will sign up thinking that that is what they are getting! In fact Robert Scoble admitted on his own blog that that’s what he thought it was:
It wasn’t what I thought it was (I was thinking it’d be an internet version of the Office Suite like PowerPoint, Excel, Word). It’s not. Get that out of your mind. And damn the marketers who are extending the Office brand.
If they really wanted to use a “Live” moniker, why didn’t they simply call it Microsoft SME Live or something similar?
I will be interviewing John Battelle for PodLeaders.com on Monday.
John is author of The Search - the book on the evolution of today’s search engines, John is one of the co-founders of Wired magazine and the founder and former Chair of Standard Media International (”The Standard”), publisher of The Industry Standard and TheStandard.com. Currently John is the founder and chairman of Federated Media Publishing.
If you have any questions you’d like me to ask him - feel free to leave them in the comments and I will put them to him.
UPDATE:
This interview has been postponed until Tuesday 28th - so you can still get your questions in if you haven’t already.
I am organising a Web 2.0 mini-conference for IT@Cork for early June of this year. I have some good speakers lined up but I’d love to get Tim O’Reilly along to speak since he wrote a seminal piece on Web 2.0.
Also, the fact that Tim is from Cork originally and this is an IT@Cork mini-conference, can’t hurt!
I checked the O’Reilly Radar site and sent an email to the contact address there but i have heard nothing back so i don’t know if Tim read the email and is too busy to respond or didn’t see it.
If anyone has contact details for Tim, can you email them to me at tom@tomrafteryit.net? Or leave suggestions in the comments?
Thanks.
I see Google have bought Measure Map an online web stats application. Google already have Google Analytics as a Web Stats application so they must really like Measure Map’s technology to say they have bought it from Adaptive Path (the developers) and have taken the Measure Maps team with them.
A comment on Paul Kedrosky’s site by Simon Cast sums up the probable thinking behind this deal nicely:
This acquisition fits very neatly into the strategy of Google becoming an arbiter of attention. Its forays into radio and print are simply the company expanding into other areas of consumer attention. However, Google also needs to be able to measure attention on non-google sites which is where Google Analytics (nee Urchin) and now Measure Map come in.
These utilities will allow Google to gain attention information which can then be used to increase the price for advertising around certain topics and sites.
Michael Arrington has speculated that the price was in the region of $5-$10m.
Martin Varsavsky is the founder and CEO of FON (as well as being the founder of highly successful companies such as Viatel, Jazztel and Ya.com). FON is a community of people who share WiFi. If you sign up with FON you share your WiFi broadband access at home/work and you get free access to other FON points wherever they exist.
FON announced last night that it has just raised €18 million from Google, Skype, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital. This puts FON in a very enviable position - they have partnerships with some of the biggest names in the business, they have money and they have a cool mission (WiFi Internet Access Everywhere).
I will be interviewing Martin Varsavsky this afternoon for a podcast on PodLeaders.com - if you have any questions you’d like me to put to him, please feel free to leave them in the comments.
UPDATE:
I have now conducted the interview and I published it over on PodLeaders. Unfortunately, having been promised a 30 minute interview by email, Martin cut off the interview after 4 minutes; so needless to say, I didn’t get to ask nearly as many questions as I would have liked. Apologies to those of you who took the trouble to leave questions.
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