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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.
Microsoft Developing Web’s Largest Advertising Network:
Ad testing begins on Office Live, Windows Live Mail and MSN Spaces.
Microsoft Corp. today announced it has begun testing display advertisements across Microsoft® Office Live, Windows Live™ Mail and MSN® Spaces. The multimarket tests include advertisements from such global companies as Coca-Cola Brazil, JCPenney Co. Inc. and Monster Worldwide Inc. and mark the beginning of providing advertisers with broader access to Microsoft’s valuable online audience. This effort will help generate revenue to provide consumers with a wide array of free and low-cost online services such as Web hosting, e-mail and Web services.
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Coca-Cola Brazil, JCPenney and Monster Worldwide are among the 20 global marketers participating in the initial ad tests. The results of the multiple ad formats being tested will help determine which ad offerings provide the best return on investment for marketers while adding value to the consumer experience.
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Windows Live display ads are currently being tested in MSN Spaces in Australia and Italy, and Windows Live Mail display ads are being tested in various markets across the world including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Office Live display ads are initially being tested in the U.S. and immediately sold out of their available openings for beta advertisers. Tests will continue on these and other Microsoft sites and services throughout 2006, while additional research is underway with approximately 100 advertisers in nine markets to verify advertisers’ needs and best practice advertising solutions for Windows Live.
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In November 2005, Microsoft outlined its Windows Live and Office Live online services vision and highlighted an advertising network in which marketers would be able to create more meaningful connections with customers while providing advertisers with the unique opportunity to connect with a new and highly coveted audience, which includes small-business owners.Microsoft will continue to invest heavily in MSN.com, as well as continue to explore new advertising opportunities on Live.com, OfficeLive.com, Microsoft.com, the Xbox Live® service, Internet Protocol television (IPTV), mobile devices and other Microsoft properties.
I was just complaining the other day that what was missing so far in the “rolling thunder” of “Live” announcements has been the money. After all, it’s hard to do “ad-supported software” without the ads. Now it looks like Microsoft’s new worldwide ad czar, Joanne Bradford, has put together a pilot test of conventional display ads for some of the “Live” services.
That’s OK for a start, but one wonders what took them so long. To paraphrase the popular wisdom about Google, “Live” isn’t in the Web 2.0 business, it’s in the business of selling ads. It’s agreed that you have to have something to get the customers in the door, but accommodating and serving ads should be a key part of every “Live” design and plan.
As for the undetailed claim of “Web’s largest advertising network,” I expect the appropriate definition is “Web’s largest advertising venue,” since I doubt that all the Microsoft properties together have more viewers than all the places on the Web currently showing Google Ads. Which brings to mind that Microsoft also still needs to launch adCenter’s contextual ads on their own and other publishers’ sites. Just selling conventional display ads on your own popular sites doesn’t win the prize.
Windows Live Expo, Microsoft’s beta classified ad service, has gotten new integration with MSN features according to a posting on the team blog:
Today, we’re thrilled to launch our integration with MSN Spaces. This integration allows you to post a free listing on Expo and have an abstract and thumbnail image displayed automatically on the front page of your MSN Space. Visitors to your Space can view abstracts from your different Expo listings and click directly to view more information and communicate with you via IM or anonymous messaging.
Here’s why we’re particularly excited: one of the reasons we built Expo was to provide an easy experience to share and view listings with those you trust: your friends. MSN Spaces captures this vision as a great communication experience among both friends and the broader web community. By posting a listing on Expo, your Space is updated, your MSN Messenger contact card is updated, and you gleam to your Messenger buddies. We hope that this automatic ‘promotion’ of your listing among those who share your interests provides the right kind of directed traffic to your listing.
Spaces, of course, is Microsoft’s free weblog service and Messenger is the Instant Messaging client. I’m still skeptical of the broad-based utility of the social aspects of Expo, but I always appreciate a clever hack.
Is it nostalgia for the 90′s or am I caught in a time warp? First, Microsoft reintroduces a warmed over bCentral, now Google has resuscitated the “build yourself a free home page service” concept with a spiffy AJAX Page Creator although mercifully without the annoying ads that were the hallmark of such services in the past. Chris Sherman has the details at SearchEngineWatch:
Google Page Creator is a web based application that uses a basic what-you-see is what-you-get style of interface, designed to allow anyone to create and publish web pages, regardless of skill or knowledge level.
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Google Page Creator is a web-based application that runs on any computer or operating system. To use it, you must have a Google account and a Gmail address. Pages that you create are stored on Google servers using a URL convention of gmailname.googlepages.com.Each user is provided with 100 megabytes of free storage space, and while there is a limit on the amount of bandwidth a site is allowed, Rosenstein says he doubts most people will ever reach the limit. The limit is primarily in place to foil the efforts of spammers, he said.
There are few restrictions on the type of content Google will allow users to publish, though Rosenstein said there won’t be any mechanisms for ecommerce or interactivity.
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Pages hosted on Google Pages are ordinary web pages, and will be included in Google’s (and presumably other search engines) web index, though they won’t be given any special treatment in ranking.
Despite their best intentions, I think they are going to have a problem with various forms of abuse. However, a bigger question is, why? Google already has the free Blogger service for would-be webloggers, so the suspicion is that it’s market positioning against the wildly popular MySpace. If so, they are going to need more than a few generalized web site templates to play.
As for the other players, Yahoo and Lycos still have those golden oldies, GeoCities and Tripod, complete with the annoying ads. Microsoft has the free MSN Spaces blogging service, but nothing in this arena and it’s not clear that they should. The real question is if or how the big names are planning to compete with MySpace.
