Interesting article talking about how industry analysts think that Microsoft has been damaged by their new “Live” branding. This follows on from Microsoft lowering it’s sales forecast from 11 percent to around 5 percent. Analysts feel that Microsoft’s Live branding has given rise to lots of confusion about their offerings even though Microsoft have attempted this in order to consolidate their services. They feel it’s still too early to see how it will pan out, but it’s not looking good, as their rivals in this space, Google and Yahoo, are growing at a much faster rate.
Personally, my opinion is that Microsoft’s Live push has been really lacking in motivation. If you look at the speed at which, say Google, launches and refines a new service, you get the impression that there is a passionate team behind each service, working day and night to make it better, listening to people’s feedback and constantly improving the service. Well, Microsoft’s efforts feel half-baked. They announce something, six months later they release something that sort of works .. and it sits in limbo for months and months. Sometimes, it feels as if there’s a couple of people sitting behind it building the service in their spare time. Maybe the problem is that Microsoft’s efforts are too fragmented and there isn’t enough investment in their online services as their core competancies are focused around the desktop market.
What do you think ?
Well, considering that most of Google’s services originate from the company’s policy to spend 20% of the time working on something you like, I guess it’s more a case of Google having employees who are (smarter) and more passionate about what they do.