Microsoft News Tracker

In the middle of February, analyst Michael Gartenberg left Jupiter Research to become a Microsoft Enthusiast Evangelist. Today, Gartenberg announced that he is leaving Microsoft and headed back to Jupiter Research. Moreover, a commenter on Dare Obsasnjo’s blog points to another goodbye from Microsoft Enthusiast Evangelist Stephanie Quilao who is leaving her post after 9 1/2 weeks to also go back to what she was doing before.

Neither of the two have hard feelings about Microsoft – they just determined that their shiny new jobs weren’t really what they wanted to do as you will find by reading their farewells. However, Quilao strikes another interesting note:

I created my blog business for less than $100, and it costs me about the price of a pair of nice jeans a month to run beyond my time and energy. I cannot do this with the current MS products or services. And I tried.
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If you’re a sole proprietor just starting out, things like Google docs and spreadsheets or ZOHO apps can get the job done for fundamental business needs like business plans, correspondence, and basic financial reports, and it’s free or at the most some small fee. Again, maybe not feature rich, but good enough. Office Live is essentially the likes of Yahoo Small Business web hosting or GoDaddy Small Business, but the difference in price for the offerings you get is not even a comparison. Yahoo and GoDaddy gives you WAY much more for far less money, and it’s more fun.
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When I speak to a group of Pro level bloggers, my passion group, I had nothing much to sell them on.When MS develops something as robust and creative as TypePad, Blogger, or WordPress, then it will be interesting.

As a Pro blogger, the only tool I use that is MS made is my wireless mouse, which is fabulous but, for real, there needs to something meatier than that. And again, I tried real hard to find more MS tools to integrate into my uber blogging, and could find none that were more compelling, more productive, or easier than what I already use, so why change?
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In the Valley, the trendsetters are about webware. Software is not bad, it’s just costly. What you can do on the web is just utterly interesting. People can also share much easier and faster. Companies must start looking at the web differently. Things are changing, rapidly. Adobe just announced that it will launch an online version of Photoshop before any of the smaller guys do it before them. I have no doubt that we will start to see more of the traditional software people do similar things. I kept asking why MS won’t just launch online versions of Office (word, excel, ppt) along with Office Live, and there was no answer that made sense to me.

I’ve already quoted way too much, but there’s a lot there that Microsoft could profitably take to heart and in my estimation, likely won’t.