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A interesting discussion has appeared over at Robert Scoble’s blog concerning Windows Live Spaces and facts/numbers regarding how many Spaces can actually be considered “blogs”. What started the discussion was Richard MacManus’s report of George Moore, General Manager for Windows Live, reporting to folks at TechEd in New Zealand how Windows Live Spaces is “now the largest blogging service on the planet”. Mike Torres, Lead Program Manager for Windows Live Spaces, replied to Scoble’s questions regarding the validity of George Moore’s remark…
And Torres revealed that about 50% of Spaces are private and “hidden from the world in almost every way.” Scoble responded that the 50% weren’t really blogs and now the blogerati are in full cry chasing the topic.
My own take is much simpler: what really matters are eyeballs and monetization. On eyeballs, earlier in the year, Microsoft was touting comScore numbers that showed 100 million unique Spaces visitors in April 2006 and made Spaces “the most widely used blogging service worldwide.” On monetization, Spaces isn’t a charity activity since Microsoft is running ads unless the Spaces bloggers ante up for a Hotmail Plus subscription, but information on profitability is in short supply. Presumably, it is intended to be merely a part of the entire Windows Live gestalt, but you can’t expect to lose money on every piece and make money on the whole.
Some recent and (mostly) pertinent news of Microsoft competitors:
Google replaces MSN as 3rd most popular Web site according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Microsoft.com is still number 2 though – maybe they should consider some PPC ads!
RealNetworks, Google and Mozilla Announce New Agreement to Distribute Firefox Web Browser and Google Toolbar with the RealPlayer, Rhapsody music service, and RealArcade games. They had been distributing the toolbar for the past two years.
Google ads will stream out to XM listeners which I expect most folks will consider a questionable distraction. Google had already been playing in terrestrial radio.
Yahoo ties knot with Indian marriage portal. How much more social could networking get than marriage? Should Microsoft be working on Windows Live Matrimony?
Lycos revamps free Webmail service with 3GB mailboxes and no limit on file attachment sizes. This puts them one up on Yahoo Mail, Google GMail, and Microsoft’s Hotmail.
AOL to Give Services Away to Broadband Users, Hoping for a Fortune in Ads. It seems like everyone’s doing it, although it may not have been an option for AOL since they were leaking users anyhow as they moved to broadband. Could it be the Last Chance For AOL? Biggest shocker: AOL will no longer actively market dial-up accounts which likely means the end of the ubiquitous promotional CDs.
McAfee unleashes the Falcon which is their answer to Windows Live OneCare.
Germany hopes to establish ‘Linux Valley’. It’s centered around Nuremberg, the home of SuSE Linux.
You may recall that back in February, Google got some favorable publicity for providing hosted Gmail for students at San Jose City College. At the time, some Microsoft PR people were upset that Microsoft wasn’t getting equal ink for their own similar program which no one else seemed to know about. The obvious answer was for Microsoft to publicize their own offering and if you were waiting with bated breath for that to happen, you can relax, because on Friday they released a Press Q&A about the Windows Live @ edu program featuring Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland as the reference customer:
In January, the university began rolling out e-mail accounts with its domain name to all 15,000 students and plans to offer the service to its alumni as well. Students aren’t likely to bump up against mailbox limits; the e-mail accounts, now based on MSN Hotmail, each come with a 250MB mailbox and will grow to 2GB when students are switched to Microsoft’s new Windows Live Mail later this year. The e-mail service also brings the features Watson’s discerning students demand – advanced junk e-mail filtering, antivirus protection tools, calendar and an address book.
Along with the e-mail service came a big bonus. Using the same ID, the university is also deploying Windows Live Messenger so students and staff can keep in touch with free audio and video conversation features as well as text messaging; MSN Spaces for participants to share blogs and build communities; and MSN Alerts so the university can notify students of special events. Students can access their e-mail wirelessly from smart phones and Pocket PCs – a major benefit given the ubiquity of mobile devices among students and the freedom those devices give them to send and retrieve e-mail without returning to a desktop computer. And Glasgow Caledonian University didn’t have to purchase an expensive e-mail system – because Microsoft is providing and hosting this service.
Glasgow Caledonian University may be special in many ways, but its deal with Microsoft isn’t one of them. Some 57 schools worldwide have either rolled out or have contracted to roll out their own branded and customized versions of this service from Microsoft and as many as 100 institutions are expected to do so by year end. All are participating in the Windows Live @ edu program, which provides institutions of higher education with flexible, robust and reliable hosted-communications services for students, alumni, and applicants. A minimal financial and infrastructure investment is made by the university to participate in the program, with Microsoft hosting the e-mail service while helping ensure the institutions maintain full control and management, including the ability to create, delete, and store e-mail addresses for their constituents.
As we mentioned at the time, the minimal investment is an installation of “Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) on a Windows Server to handle the user management.” That rather keeps it from being a hands-off offering like Google’s, but either one is undoubtedly a good deal for the schools since they are free. As for Google and Microsoft, besides the public relations value, what they are offering is only a little different from what is already free to all comers on the Internet with the exception of using the school’s domain name.
Per the Associated Press:
Trend Micro Inc., a maker of antivirus and network security software, said on Monday it received an extension on a 2004 contract with Microsoft Corp. to provide antivirus scanning and cleaning services to 230 million MSN Hotmail e-mail accounts.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed; nor did the company say for how long the contract had been extended.
Apparently the Microsoft server antivirus products (Microsoft Client Protection, Antigen) don’t apply, aren’t ready yet, or can’t handle the considerable Hotmail load.
