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In April, Niall Kennedy of Technorati fame joined Microsoft “to create a new product team around syndication technologies such as RSS and Atom.” Things seemed not have worked out as he is leaving August 18 for his own startup. These things happen, but more interesting is what he has to say about how things are going with Windows Live:
The Windows Live initiative got off to a huge start, with lots of new services created and an “invest to win” strategy in the new division. There were so many new programs created and headcount opening up Microsoft told Wall Street it would be spending $2 billion more than anticipated in the short-term to cover these new costs including over 10,000 new hires over the last fiscal year.
The stock plummeted on the announcement Microsoft did not have its costs under control. Microsoft’s market cap lost close to $59 billion in the six weeks after I joined and second quarter financials were released, more than the GDP of Ecuador and over half the market cap of Google. What do you do when the market responds to your 6 month-old online services strategy by reducing your valuation by 1.5 Yahoos? Windows Live is under some heavy change, reorganization, pullback, and general paralysis and unfortunately my ability to perform, hire, and execute was completely frozen as well.
There’s more by following the link, but the impression that Microsoft gives of stiff arming the importuning Wall Streeters in order to invest in growth technologies doesn’t seem to be real clear to the troops.
Of course, I am exaggerating. Microsoft wouldn’t be doing share buybacks if they were completely oblivious to investors and maybe that’s the real problem. Going for both “guns and butter” is a famous recipe for getting neither.
Update: LiveSide and ValleyWag interview Keenedy.
Update 8/9: Todd Bishop reports the Microsoft response:
Responded Adam Sohn, a Microsoft spokesman, in a statement issued by the company: “We are not pulling back on the Live effort at all. We are totally committed and seeing great momentum across the company.”
Today at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Microsoft Corp. announced the acquisition of the assets of Onfolio Inc., a privately held, Cambridge, Mass.-based Internet research and information management provider. Onfolio’s technology has been incorporated into the Windows Live™ Toolbar to enhance the way people discover, save and reuse their personal and professional Web research. The new Onfolio Add-in for the Windows Live Toolbar beta will give people convenient ways to collect information online and organize it on their PCs. People can harness this information by saving it onto their computer so that it can be easily accessed for use in documents, e-mail messages and blog postings. In addition, new online information is easily discovered and accessed through Onfolio’s integrated Really Simple Syndication (RSS) aggregator and reader. The Windows Live Toolbar beta with the Onfolio Add-in is available now and can be downloaded at http://ideas.live.com.
Onfolio was founded by J.J. Allaire and others from the old Allaire Corporporation which created the extremely popular ColdFusion before being acquired by Macromedia. I’m an Onfolio user and, while it has a very functional RSS reader, where it really shines is in the filing and organization of Web content. I long ago gave up on trying to keep Web favorites/bookmarks organized and Onfolio is the best mechanism I’ve found. I’ll be interested to see how well Onfolio makes the transition, but it looks like Microsoft just landed with both feet on the RSS reader market.
Update: A partial retraction of the above. The announcement of the Windows Live Toolbar makes it seem that the RSS reader is going to be Web based and not a Windows client application like today’s Onfolio. This is going to require some clarification or hands-on testing to sort out, but not every application should be Web based. I guess I have a personal interest in Microsoft making the right choice in this case.
Update: He sighs with relief. Onfolio remains a standalone RSS reader accessed through a browser. Unfortunately, the requirement for the Windows Live Toolbar means that Firefox is no longer supported, and Windows Desktop Search is now used withing Onfolio instead of their own search, but other than that it seems much the same.
Based on the amount of press coverage and blog posts, it’s the biggest story of the day. What started it all is that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 team has agreed to use the same icon as Mozilla’s Firefox to indicate the presence of a RSS feed on a web page. The possibility that Microsoft might use something else had geeky passions inflamed earlier in the year. Who knows what could be next? Maybe they’ll agree on whether they are “bookmarks” or “favorites.”
Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie used a post on his blog to introduce the Simple Sharing Extensions to RSS that Microsoft is developing. A FAQ and a draft spec (released under a Creative Commons Attribute-Share Alike license) provide more details, but the basic idea is to extend RSS for bi-directional data flows so that disparate applications can share data, instead of the conventional publish/read flow of RSS.
And so we created an RSS extension that we refer to as Simple Sharing Extensions or SSE. In just a few weeks time, several Microsoft product groups and my own ‘concept development group’ built prototypes and demos, and found that it works and interoperates quite nicely.
We’re pretty excited about the extension – well beyond the uses that catalyzed its creation. It’s designed in such a way that the minimum implementation is incredibly easy, and so that higher-level capabilities such as conflict handling can be implemented in those applications that want to do such things.
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At this point, various groups at Microsoft have begun to further develop their early prototypes to see what we can learn, and to ensure that the spec is sufficient. There’s nothing to announce right now in terms of which products will support the spec, when, and for what purpose, but people are experimenting with it and are intrigued. It’s time to bring the spec to you, so that you can do the same.We’ve numbered the draft specification 0.9 because we have a good degree of confidence in its usefulness based on the prototyping that we’ve done thus far, but it’s certainly not a 1.0 and I would certainly caution against building anything ‘production’ on it quite yet.
More by hitting the links.
