In 2009, Microsoft Still Underestimates the Web

Business acquire companies to make money, to get ROI. That comes well before beating a competitor in any investment, unless its clear that they will damage your market share in the future.

Consumers will still need desktop OS's for a long time and Google isn't competing with Microsoft on the enterprise front (yet).

Live search is only a small portion of Microsoft's revenue, but $44 billion is a significant amount of cash.

I tried to get it so I could have a Windows machine for IE testing.

1) It required me to log in with my Microsoft Id. I didn't have one. No link or hint for how to create an account.

2) I clicked about a bit and found where to create an account. The SSL certificate was flagged as signed by an unrecognized authority. It was still a microsoft machine and I had come in from a trusted path, so I accepted it anyway.

3) This new account sent me an email to validate, but allowed me to log in and proceed BEFORE the validation was sent. Probably an abuse vector there.

4) I then get a page with a little green "loading" indicator spinning about. After staring at that for an hour I checked the javascript log and the javascript had blown up on load and left the animated gif misleading me that progress was happening. Don't be updating the loading user feedback device if you aren't loading. That is called lying.

5) Tried a couple more browsers, no better results. Eventually it degraded to 404s and then a "Coming Soon" page.

There are numerous warts on a rollout that is, at least partially, intended to change the media dialog from the negative tone of Vista to a "now things are good" message of Windows 7.

Personally I could never understand why does everybody think Microsoft must become a great Internet company. I do understand that a lot of people are tired of so many years of Microsoft dominance on the desktop and are willing to look stupid predicting their collapse just because another markets opened up that MS isn't dominating in (yet). But hey, IBM is still around and doing fine.

A friendly reminder to Web 2.0 types: the only company making seriously big piles of cash, the big boys club kind, is Google. And the rest of Internet ghetto can only dream of making the kind of cash Microsoft is generating without "getting it".

And speaking of new markets...

Here's another reminder: measured in computer years, widespread Internet is very, very, very old and can hardly be called a "disruptive technology" anymore. We've all had fun throwing VC-supported sheep for free, now lets get back to work, figuring out what software users want.

That's what Apple's been doing, and perhaps this is what Microsoft has done with Windows 7. I hope so, even though I'm not their customer.

And c'mon, how many times has a Linux distro come out just to download annoyingly slow for the first few days? This is a much bigger launch than a new Linux distro.