Well, no. Last week Robert Scoble, formerly part of Microsoft's "evangelism group," laid into his old employer when he posted on his influential blog, Scobleizer (scobleizer.com) a rant in response to an event at which Microsoft's "Most Valuable Professionals" were told that the Seattle software behemoth is "in it to win."
"The words are empty," Scoble blasted. "Come on. Ship a better search, a better advertising system than Google, a better hosting service than Amazon and get some services out there that are innovative. Where's the video RSS reader?"
Scoble has a point about Microsoft's Web delivery. When you think about Web searching, blogging tools, cool software such as Picasa and Google Earth and online apps, you think of Google.
Microsoft's Live Search barely registers on the radar, while we struggled to remember what its clone of Google Earth is called (it's Microsoft Virtual Earth, since you asked). Windows Live One care, offering online protection and maintenance for your PC, hasn't exactly set the world on fire.
However, the thing about Microsoft is that it's like a tanker: slow to get on course, but once it does, there's no stopping it. Back in the day, there used to be all sorts of productivity software. Remember Lotus 123, the spreadsheet that changed the world? It was a killer app for the early IBM PCs. But what's the dominant spreadsheet now? It's not Lotus 123, it's Microsoft's Excel.
And how about WordPerfect and WordStar? The latter these days is mostly used by the WordStar Users Group, while the rest of the world has moved on to -- yup, Microsoft Word. And WordPerfect, once the de facto word-processing app, has gone the same way. Now part of Corel's suite, its user base is tiny compared with the millions who fire up Word every day.
Microsoft was late to the party with a Web browser, left behind by Mosaic, the first clunky app that got you online, and then lagging behind the Netscape browser. But where are they now? Various flavors of Internet Explorer have been less than perfect, but the consensus is that IE7 has got it mostly right.
History shows that Microsoft can be tardy. But once it gets there, it sweeps others aside. So Scoble might one day have to eat his words.
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