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First, AOL decided to give away their basic membership services free to broadband users (press release here). Then they announced a plan to offer 5GB of online storage free to all comers (press release here). It turns out they were just getting started.
On Monday – AOL Launches Free Anti-Virus Program for All Online Users:
AOL today launched a new free anti-virus program — called Active Virus Shield — for all online users at no cost. Active Virus Shield is powered by Kaspersky Lab, one of the largest Internet security solutions providers in the world, and offers advanced detection technology to stop viruses, spyware, malware and Trojans before they attack, as well as real-time scanning of files and email. The software automatically updates every hour, offering an easy and convenient way for consumers to protect themselves from the thousands of new Internet threats created each month.
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Active Virus Shield can be downloaded at www.activevirusshield.com
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Active Virus Shield is free of charge, and there is no obligation or AOL membership required to use it. Active Virus Shield works with Windows XP (home & Professional), NT, 2000, ME, & 98, Internet Explorer 5.5 and above, and requires about 50MB of spare disk space.
This seems to be a subset of the “Total Care” package that AOL was rumored to be working on and the description makes it out to be a fairly conventional antivirus offering, presumably one of Kaspersky’s standard products. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Windows Live OneCare, but it gets a user a lot of the way there and it’s free which undercuts even Microsoft’s lowball OneCare pricing and has a cachet all its own:
“Antivirus protection is too important to make people have to pay for it,” an AOL representative told CNET News.com in an e-mail interview.
Indeed, but wait, there’s more! Today, it was announced that AOL To Offer Personalized Email Domains for Free to All Web Users:
AOL today announced that, starting in September, it will make personalized email domains available for free to all Web users. AOL is the first company to offer this service, which will be called AOL(R) My eAddress, at no charge.
With AOL My eAddress, anyone can set up and register a completely customized email address using .COM or .NET domains, and add up to 100 additional identities onto their personal domain, all at no charge. For example, someone could choose a domain that family, friends, teams, social organizations and others could use, for example anyname@mygroupname.com,” and other members within that group could have their own email identity using that domain. Or, Individuals can also choose to set up a new personalized address with the popular and widely-used AOL.com domain, at no charge.
Consumers will be able to use their personalized My eAddress domain as an email address, as their AIM(R) address to send and receive instant messages and access their Buddy List(R) feature, to access features across the AOL network, and, coming soon, as the address of their own personal Web page on the free AIM(R) Pages social networking service.
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– Setup, registration and the use of a My eAddress email domain and identity is all free (one domain per user), as is the ability to invite other people to join their personalized domain. Each account holder can add up to 100 additional personal email identities associated with their domain, all managed through an easy Web-based control panel.
At first blush it appears to be the equivalent of Windows Live Custom Domains, but it has a critical difference. With Custom Domains you show up with your already registered domain name and Microsoft gives you email. With My eAddress, it appears that AOL is going to be registering and renewing the domains for their users for free much like Microsoft does with Office Live Basics. I guess domain registration is now the new loss leader in the consumer space as well.
Update 8/10: Kevin Kelleher at The Street.com thinks that AOL’s free domain offer is one of the reasons that domain registrar GoDaddy canceled its IPO.
Jay Greene and Peter Burrows, with Steve Hamm at BusinessWeek online:
A How-To kit for the ideal PC has been making the rounds of leading design shops. It calls for “accelerated curves” and “purposeful contrast.” The preferred colors include a shade of black called Obsidian and a translucent white dubbed Ice. “We want people to fall in love with their PCs, not to simply use them to be productive and successful,” reads the enclosed booklet. “We want PCs to be objects of pure desire.”
Doesn’t sound much like Microsoft (MSFT), does it? But it is. BusinessWeek has learned that a team of 20 in-house designers has been working quietly for the past 18 months on an elegant new look for PCs that will run Microsoft’s next operating system, Windows Vista. It’s a major departure for the company, which historically has left design to the likes of Dell (DELL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and Gateway (GTW). Persuading the hardware guys to embrace the toolkit won’t be easy. They’re already working overtime to build better-looking gear on their own.
Microsoft for years has pushed their functional specifications on OEMs via the Windows Hardware Engineering Conferences and other mechanisms, but style?
Microsoft is no newcomer to hardware design, of course. The company has made PC mice and keyboards for years. The Xbox game console has been a hit. Microsoft is working on a music player, Zune, that it hopes will rival the iPod.
Microsoft’s mice and keyboards are nicely done, but they’re a niche and the Xbox 360 was created with significant outside design help. I expect that the same is true for the Zune, so it’s not quite clear exactly what Microsoft brings to the table. More to the point, the PC business has some tough cost strictures:
But trying to transform the PC ecosystem—even peripherals makers such as Logitech received the kit—takes things to a whole new level. It reflects the fact that the economics of the computer business is changing. The PC world used to be divided into two camps: those who made lucrative software and the poor schlubs who built the low-margin hardware it ran on.
Apple has turned that model on its head. From the beginning it has managed to create a unified design for its products by building everything itself, first with the Mac and then later with the iPod. Although Apple sells one computer for every 20 PCs, the iPod’s success has proved how crucial it is to create a seamless experience for consumers, who are buying much of the gear these days. Says a top PC design executive: “You’re going to see more and more of this desire to integrate hardware and software.”
I’ll buy that, but it’s not clear to me how a color scheme will make the experience seamless – I would have thought the seamless part would start a little closer to Redmond. Besides, if you really want something snappier than a beige box, you don’t have to look too far (e.g. [1] if you like bright lights). It sounds more like Microsoft is worried that the OEMs aren’t following their functional “suggestions” in lockstep and the styling suggestions are just a bonus.
Hit the link for much more, but the big PC makers aren’t exactly jumping for joy at the chance to further commoditize their products. When all Windows PCs are the same except for the manufacturer’s logo, their margin inevitably goes to zero. I do wonder though if Microsoft has any thoughts of ditching their pesky partners on PCs, just like they did on personal media players with the Zune? It would make the Apple emulation complete.
There was so much product news at last week’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Boston that I gave rather short shrift to some of the more conventional partner promotional activities. Paul F. Roberts and China Martens at InfoWorld:
But with the release of Office 2007 delayed and company founder Bill Gates saying Vista, the next version of Windows, is only “80 percent” guaranteed for its January 2007 release, Microsoft needed to bring more than just good vibes to Beantown. As it turned out, Ballmer brought both carrot and stick: new pricing programs and incentives for partners in one hand and vague threats for those who sell non-Microsoft products in the other.
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For example, SSA (Security Software Advisor) is a new program that provides considerable cash incentives to partners that deploy Microsoft security products such as the Forefront family of client and server security products, ISA Server, and Antigen messaging security products. To promote its security wares, Microsoft is promising to “skill up” existing partners on security and is permitting certifications from organizations such as ISC2 and ISACA to satisfy its Security Partner Competency, said Steve Brown, director of product management for security, access, and solutions at Microsoft.Microsoft is also dangling cash, offering partners bonuses of as much as 20 percent of the total sales of its security products, and 30 percent in the next seven months, Brown said.
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But Microsoft is also taking a tougher line with its partners and resellers, as Ballmer made clear in his keynote. Partners, he said, have a choice to work with Microsoft or its competitors.“Some of these choices will probably be less comfortable than some of the other choices that we present you with from time to time,” Ballmer said.
No real details on the “stick,” but there were more carrots including a branch office infrastructure promotion, an updated SQL Server competitive migration program, revised terms for reselling Microsoft systems management software, plus a little boosterism of Windows Vista for the ISVs in the crowd.
While all this is typical partner program activity, Mary Jo Foley at Microsoft Watch picked up on some interesting comments from Steve Ballmer:
Microsoft partners won’t see much, if any, new revenues from Microsoft’s growing Live family of services in the next year. But throughout the coming decade, the Live tide will transform the kinds of products and services that Microsoft and its partners will be selling, according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
A brave vision, for sure, but what’s really in it for the partners?
On the Live side of the house, Ballmer said Microsoft would continue to build out new services on the search, content, collaboration, communications and business services fronts.“That transition will require that we bring you – our partner community – with us,” Ballmer said. “There will be services we host and services you host. Some services sold by you on commission basis. There will be value add around hosted services.”
Among the new Live opportunities Microsoft forsees for partners are AdCenter referrals, Live subscription referrals, hosted managed services and applications, reselling Live subscriptions and hosted solutions and customization of on-premise, hosted and Live solutions, Ballmer told attendees.
Let’s run ‘em down:
- AdCenter referrals: If this is just a reference to a standard referral program, there’s not much there. However, there are businesses today that help Google AdWords customers optimize their buys and there isn’t any reason why there wouldn’t be the same opportunity for AdCenter. That’s more an ad agency or media buyer function than the usual partner fare.
- Live Subscription referrals and reselling Live subscriptions: This sounds pretty nebulous for the consumer space since Windows Live is mostly free and Xbox Live is more retail fodder than a partner business. I guess there’s some spare change in Office Live referrals, but it’s hard to see much of a continuing revenue stream. There’s likely more cash in a referral for the Microsoft hosted Live Dynamics CRM that Ballmer announced, but it’s hard to see how it could compare with the revenue from a VAR installation of regular Dynamics CRM.
- Hosted managed services and applications: Since that same Microsoft hosted Live Dynamics CRM announcement blew partners who were already hosting Dynamics out of the water, this hardly seems enticing.
- Hosted solutions and customization of on-premise, hosted and Live solutions: Now we’re talking real partner business. Partners who build and/or install custom solutions can now use Live services as infrastructure instead of today’s installation on a customer owned server. So far, Live Dynamics CRM is the only one to work with though.
To net it out, if Ballmer wasn’t just blowing smoke, there must be a slew of Microsoft hosted middleware on the way and partners will have to expand their value add beyond mere provisioning of Microsoft based infrastructure. Fair enough, but where does this fit in today’s troika of Windows, Office, and Xbox Live? The question wasn’t answered for Microsoft Live Dynamics CRM which seems to sit out on its own. but maybe there’s a Microsoft Business Solutions Live coming?
That’s the story from the Windows Vista Weblog which points (via NeoSeeker) to a report on Groklaw from LinuxForum on Monday quoting IBM’s Andreas Pleschek. Pleschek, who is “working at IBM in Stuttgart, Germany, and head of open source and Linux technical sales across North East Europe” makes some interesting statements about IBM’s software product plans in regards to Open Source and then drops the bomb:
Andreas Pleschek also told that IBM has cancelled their contract with Microsoft as of October this year. That means that IBM will not use Windows Vista for their desktops. Beginning from July, IBM employees will begin using IBM Workplace on their new, Red Hat-based platform. Not all at once – some will keep using their present Windows versions for a while. But none will upgrade to Vista.
There are more details by following the link, but not unexpectedly, the IBM Workplace client uses OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office so that’s out too. It’s not clear whether this policy actually applies to all of IBM or just some portion of Europe, but it’ll undoubtedly be exciting for the relevant support staff. I should also mention that this is just the standard IBM office PC. IBM software developers for Windows environments would presumably get an exception.
While IBM is a large company, I don’t think the loss of IBM’s desktops makes much difference to Microsoft except for the unfortunate salesman assigned to the IBM account. It does however, make it clear that IBM is turning serious about desktop Linux.
Finally, Pleschek’s presentation had items of general interest as well:
Last year, IBM changed their business model after a Gartner study told them that 19% of the software market will move from commercial, proprietary software to open source software over the next five years. IBM’s new philosophy is to take the best from both worlds. They will use open source for the commodities, i.e. things that everyone need, such as file zippers, browsers and word processors. On the other hand, he said, proprietary software is better for specialized software – mainly because there is not enough community interest to drive a complex, fast development for something that only a few people need. He said that there is a pendulum motion between the two, so the border between what is best solved by Open Source and what is best solved by proprietary software moves all the time.
Accordingly, IBM will now offer three categories of software: Some will be Open Source, which they will help develop, sponsor or even donate to the Open Source community. Also, they will offer support and integration for it. Some software will still be proprietary – mostly their big, complex systems in full-blown versions. And some will be offered as closed source, but free download. That will often be watered-down versions of the proprietary software. He used the term “community edition”.
When asked from the audience whether the new business model works, he said that IBM’s customers loved it but that their sales persons were “concerned”. But since Gartner predicted that 19% of the market shares would be lost anyway, he did not think that it makes much difference on sales. And if they can sell support to just 10% of the customers that switch to open source, they will still be better off.
I would guess that the salesmen were still a hard sell since, for obvious reasons, they tend to have a short time horizon.
Update: Antone Gonsalves at InformationWeek is reporting that IBM is denying the story:
IBM employees using Linux desktops are switching to Red Hat Inc.’s version of the open-source operating system, but the company denied reports that it’s planning to dump Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, a company spokeswoman said Wednesday.
The number of Linux users within the Armonk, N.Y., company is about 5 percent of IBM’s 329,000 employees, spokeswoman Nancy Kaplan said. The workers include software developers and designers, people configuring software and hardware bundles for customers and others who need to use Linux as part of their jobs.
“The Linux plan is for people who have a need for Linux, as part of their jobs, will use it,” Kaplan said. “We have not made Linux available to the general employee population and there are no plans to do that.”
Andreas Pleschek, head of open source and Linux technical sales across Northeast Europe, was erroneously quoted this week as saying IBM had cancelled its Windows contract with Microsoft as of October, and did not intend to upgrade to Vista, the next major upgrade of the operating system, Kaplan said.
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As to whether IBM would upgrade to Vista, the company was in the process of evaluating the OS and had not made a decision, Kaplan said.
