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Story: Microsoft details Windows Live 'platform'
Posted by: Arthur B. (Wednesday 14 June 2006, 11:04 PM)
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.
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