Microsoft has spelled out its strategy to make its Live Web services accessible to third-party developers, part of its push to capitalise on online services.
At the Microsoft TechEd conference in Boston on Tuesday, executives sketched out the technical infrastructure the company is building. They also discussed key elements of the business model, notably advertising, that Microsoft is expecting to fuel its services push.
"Windows Live services as a platform allows you as a business to establish relationships with consumers," said George Moore, the general manager of Windows Live Development Platform.
Microsoft provides Web hosting services and a range of Internet-delivered services, such as storage, identity authentication and search. It also offers applications such as Web email or instant messenging.
Moore said that there are more than 240 million users of Hotmail, Microsoft's Web email, and more than 230 million Microsoft Messenger users. Businesses or developers can build services that reach those consumers through these and other Microsoft Web properties, he said.
"We're building an audience, and it is addressable by businesses that choose to build these services," Moore said.
He said as applications that use Live services become available, there will be more advertising money available to fuel development of more of those services.
One example of these "mashups" of applications and Live service would be a real estate application that allows someone to see, using the Virtual Earth mapping service, the number of homes in a certain area.
At TechEd, Microsoft executives also showed off a "bot" application on Windows Messenger, where a person typed in questions via the instant messaging program to find out movie times or get help desk support.
Microsoft is seeking to enlist third-party developers to write these mashup applications, which combine information from different sites. By building up a network of Live partners, which could be individuals or other software companies, Microsoft hopes to drive traffic to its sites, executives said.
The company is trying to appeal to developers who write so-called Web 2.0 applications related to public Web sites, such as search or mapping services. And Microsoft is trying to draw in corporate developers and independent software vendors, executives said.
Right now, most Live services can be accessed by programmers via an application programmer interface (API). Over the course of the year, Microsoft will release more APIs in different forms, said Ken Levy, a product planner for Windows Live Platform.
In addition, Microsoft will seek to make it easier to write mashup applications that run on a "rich client", or a full-featured Windows PC, rather than through a browser, said Scott Swanson, group planning manager for Windows Live Platform.
Talkback
Hmmm, making on-line Microsoft web services feature rich spells out spammer, phishing and cracker heaven. We've been down this road with Microsoft before. Too much features up to and including becoming more bloat then usefull. Just to attract developers of all levels and skills between which the average user can't choose so more often then not crapware ends up on their system and ruins the entire experience (at least, Microsoft told us plenty times before that the main reasons for BSOD, crashes, disfunctions, hacks and what not is mostly the blame of under educated IT specialists and third-party developers; of course, that doesn't need to be your own conclusion provided you can still think for yourself). Anyway, summing Windows Live up seems to boil down to: focus on more functionality, attract developers whereever they are, flood the markets with as much tools etc as possible, sell band-aids as security services, once successful bring in the ad campaign, boost the prices by means of increasing the subscription charge for whatever additional functionality people will pay extra for even just to get rid of the otherwise increasing amount of targeted ads.
It'll be interesting to see how far people can be pushed before they dump their familiair Windows world and move on because most certainly Microsoft is crossing line after line just to see how far they can go. Critical mass likely to be around 10% - 20% loss of market share. Leaving the other 80% - 90% to caugh up the "loss of revenue" one way or another.