Incremental Blogger

It’s time to face reality: Microsoft needs to stop what it’s doing and clone the iPhone.

After using the iPhone over the last year, I’ve come to realize that the iPhone and its browser (and now its 3rd party apps) are consuming more and more of my time. It’s even eating into my notebook/Tablet PC browse time. The iPhone model is winning.

Of course, I’m not really suggesting to clone the iPhone exactly. I’m just saying, that like with the original Mac, we’ve seen the future and what Microsoft has so far is not it. Time to bite the bullet and copy. They’re right; you’re wrong.

Here are some thoughts along these lines:

Dump IE. Don’t port it. We’re talking rewrite time. Safari is more appropriate although not ideal with its touch navigation and attempt at smart zooming. In addition, out of the box there ought to be live video, Flash, and Silverlight in the browser. These are musts.

There has to be live video support. Period. The built-in camera has to be top notch too. Done right, this isn’t going to be just a phone, it’s going to be the owner’s most used camera for most. Think simple. Don’t go overboard.

On the plus side:

Microsoft knows touch with all of its experiences with the Tablet PCs and UMPCs. It’s time to leverage this on a better, thinner iPhone like device.

I’m convinced Microsoft can make a better iPhone in part because it won’t try to do all on its own. There has to be an open and vibrant developer community, which is something Microsoft knows how to do much, much better than Apple.

Another huge advantage that Microsoft would have with an iPhone clone is that Microsoft can leverage its huge community base to give much better and richer feedback to minimize nasty bugs–which have plagued every iteration of the iPhone. Microsoft can do better here.

One bit of advice I’d give to Microsoft is to take every opportunity to improve the ease of use of the iPhone. For instance, if there’s public or known WIFI and poor cell phone coverage, the phone should transparently switch coverage. Dropped calls–especially when at home where you’re most likely to have WIFI–shouldn’t exist. Not on a good phone anyway. Whatever you add, it should be about improving ease of use, not simply blowing people away with coolness.

If Microsoft wants to differentiate more; one place to do so is with the built in apps. I’m not talking about scientific calculators here. I’m talking live weather radars, better traffic monitoring, flight tracking, and more. Make it a phone that people will use to make their lives better.

Oh, I’m sure Microsoft will also toss in a bunch of IT stuff too, but be cautious here. Don’t make things complicated for everyone else.

That’s it. Time to just do it.

Robert Scoble’s right about the nature of the Valley: people readily go from one venture to the next–whether it’s Yahoo or Google or whatever. That’s one of the things that makes the Valley so dynamic and interesting.

From the outset I thought a Microsoft-Yahoo teaming was a relatively good one for both sides. The only thing better for Yahoo might be an Apple-Adobe-Yahoo mindmelt. The tripple merger could create a venture that would rival Microsoft and Google. But personalities and cultures being what they are it’s very, very unlikely to happen. You see, maximizing shareholder value is not as absolute as many make it out to be.

In fact, really put your maximizing shareholder hat on and ask yourself why Microsoft even needs to acquire any or all of Yahoo at this point. Let the press and market attack Yahoo, point fingers, Ichan change the board, the instability discourage key employees, and so on and let the company and stock slide. Why not? An indirect assault on Yahoo knocking it from #2 over a cat and mouse game makes a whole lot more sense than going in debt to acquire it. Doesn’t it?

Of course, Microsoft might want to leverage Yahoo’s audience today in order to capitalize on its advertising capabilities. Makes sense at least in the short term. I’m sure someone has worked the numbers to make this case.

Now, of course, my engineering mind would rather think in terms of innovation than business tactics and in this regard here’s what I’ve been recommending to both Yahoo and Microsoft:

* For Yahoo, acquire AllTop and bring in Guy Kawasaki. The directory-oriented AllTop property makes sense from a DNA perspective at Yahoo and with Guy on board the community and entrepreneurial connections would be refreshing and invigorating.

And yes, I’ll go back to my Apple-Adobe-Yahoo merger suggestion, but that’s more up to Apple and Adobe than Yahoo.

* And for Microsoft: I’d work more closely with the MVPs when it comes to advertising. Build an ad system that gives value to their sites. There’s a reason after all that the top traffic sites don’t use Google ads. Leverage their weakness.

I realize it’s just business, but all of this talk of buying a business and disassembling it to gain market advantage is making me uneasy.

I’m an engineer at heart. I like competing in the marketplace, although I realize that many a great business was built and thrived by its strategy and not by its products.

P-I columnist Bill Virgin takes offense at Steve Ballmer’s recent assertion that “There will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.” In response to this, Bill Virgin argues that if Microsoft is going to proclaim the end of print newspapers it’s fair game for him to proclaim the end of Microsoft: “By 2018, there will be no more Microsoft.”

This is silly. First, the two are quite different. Ballmer isn’t arguing that the SeattlePI or any other “print” media company can’t still exist, he’s just making the point that the distribution pipeline will change. That’s like predicting the replacement of 8 Track tapes with cassette tapes or CDs, etc, etc, etc. Because 8 Track tapes disappeared didn’t mean the record businesses dried up.

Also, I think anyone at Microsoft would agree that the Microsoft 10 years from now will be different from the one today. You could say the old one dies away or you could just say it’s part of an evolutionary cycle. Change is going to happen. It’s a good thing. Are you really satisfied with the way computers are today? I’m not.

For instance, 10 years from now, what if there are super lightweight inexpensive devices that fold out easily which you can use to read books, magazines and newspapers on? Doesn’t take much to predict that if such devices exist that Microsoft would be developing software for them and/or helping to push ads out to these devices. The SeattlePI could just as easily adapt to be a content provider on these devices and maybe also manage its own ads or leverage a service from others, including Microsoft and/or Google or some other third party. Both companies would have a role in a landscape such as this.

So whereas I disagree with Ballmer that in 10 years or so print will be gone, I think his general argument is correct: That the print world is moving digital, in large part because it is a more efficient medium for most content.

That being said, I think Ballmer missed an opportunity here: He should have presented his idea in the affirmative rather than the negative. A positive statement is much more inspiring. For example, he could have said with similar vigor, “At Microsoft we envision a future, not too far from now, where all media will be offered in electronic form over an IP network.” See how much better this sounds than the same sentement phrased with “no”s and “not”s? Sure, no matter how you put it, some people will be threatened by the potential change. However, most will nod in agreement although they may quibble about the time. I doubt Bill Virgin would have penned his column this way if Ballmer been made is statement the other way. Notice, too, how a positive statement like this is similar to one Microsoft used for many years, namely that they strived to get a PC in every home. Yep, positive wins.

Kara Swisher puts her nightmare-vision glasses on and predicts that a series of Google acquisitions would be a terrible thing for Microsoft. She suggests that if Google were to acquire “Digg, moves onto, say, Spot Runner and others (Meebo, FriendFeed, iLike and even Slide?), focused especially in the online ad, messaging, online apps and mobile spaces” it would be a terrible thing for Microsoft.

I don’t buy the premise at all. Digg is no YouTube. Facebook isn’t even YouTube material if you ask me. So if Google wants to buy up all these companies, fine by me. It’s kind of like a major TV network buying up the top shows and moving them to their network to better leverage advertising. But like all good TV shows or restaurants, eventually they become the same old same old and fall out of favor. Digg is already on that downward spiral. Outside of the student market, Facebook is shows signs up banging its head against the wall too. Even eBay is looking mighty tired–outside of being a stained virtual-brick built online mall for small businesses.

I don’t think it would be a big deal if Google purchased all of these companies. Now it might help Microsoft short term I guess if Microsoft were the acquirer. But my guess is for whatever it would cost for Microsoft to buy them it wouldn’t be worth it.

To me, a much worse nightmare would be the trifecta of Apple, Adobe, and Yahoo joining forces. These three companies merged into one would rival Microsoft and Google.

First, it would solidify Yahoo’s foothold as #2 in search and very well might push it up to Google levels at least on the stock side as Disney comes into the mix. Yahoo wouldn’t just become mail.yahoo.com and a so-so content platform, it would bring in online content–much from Disney–like few others could deliver. Tied in with Apple’s platforms, you could imagine some rich experiences that few could leverage. Apple TV and Apple WiFi phones and Apple Chat and on and on could explode in popularity in a relatively short time.

Second, on the developer side, Adobe’s current developer strategy which is doing pretty well with Flash, Flex, and Air, but combined with Apple’s well-tuned platforms, it could become an even more compelling story. Just compare Google’s Android-home-run-aspirations or Microsoft’s psuedo-crossplatform efforts with .NET and Silverlight to this three way merger. Mix in Flickr APIs and similar possible online efforts in Yahoo and I think you have what could be a standing eight count for Microsoft and a couple years upset stomach for Google.

And third, an Apple-Adobe-Yahoo merger would help to solidify Apple not just as a consumer force to be reckoned with, but would help propel enterprise sales, in part because of possible tie ins with Adobe’s PDF/Acrobat strong holds. If Adobe can continue to leverage Flash and keep pushing Flex and Air in the enterprise and Apple’s hardware sales can go along for the ride, this could really challenge any of the Dell or HP packages at least in the US.

So yes, Kara, one could argue that Microsoft should try to swallow up every company it can before Google does so–and yeah, this might not be a bad thing short term–but this is by no means the worst nightmare for Microsoft. Of course, an Apple-Adobe-Yahoo merger is highly unlikely given all of the personalities. Kara’s prediction is more likely. But since we’re talking about nightmares….

Although it would have been cool for at least once for Bill Gates to use a Tablet PC during one of his keynotes, he at least doesn’t fail to mention them. In his final keynote as full-time Microsoft chairman at TechEd, Gates talks of Tablets and education:

“I think of every student having a device that avoids the need for paper textbooks. The Tablet device will let them take notes, record audio, connect to the Internet. It’ll be superior in every way and yet it can’t be purely keyboard based. It has to have this touch and pen as well.”

In case you’re wondering, he didn’t say much more about Windows 7 other than referring to the multi-touch demoed last week at D. He did add:

“We’ve also got the pen capability, that we’re taking to a whole new level in terms of easy recognition and how that is implemented in the hardware.”

Not sure if he was referring to Windows 7 here what’s currently available in Vista. My guess is the latter, but it’s hard to tell.

I was glad he finally is mentioning vision in more detail. This has been a very lacking aspect of Microsoft’s interaction strategy if you ask me. Surface, TouchWall and the like are all beginning to use cameras, though there’s lots more than can and should be done. I’d like to see a whole new vision processing capabilities added to the .NET Framework.

U.C. Berkeley held an event the other day to honor leading scientist Jim Gray.

I met Jim Gray at a conference once. By chance. He was sitting at a round, snack-sized table by himself using a Tablet PC–as a Tablet PC. You know with the screen folded down, with a pen in hand. I don’t see many people using a Tablet this way, so I had to stop and talk with him.

It turned out to be a fascinating hour-long conversation that has stuck with me like few others.

I had no idea who Jim Gray was when I talked with him. If I had, I probably wouldn’t have bothered him. So I’m glad I didn’t know.

He started by explaining to me how much he liked the Tablet PC idea and how he could see it being so much more. He told me he was at the event not to promote anything, but rather to see what other people were doing.

The conversation continued by talking about several things pro and con about Tablets and then eventually migrated to some of the Tablet apps I was working on. He keenly seemed interested and was able to grasp what I was trying to do with some of the applications like few others have.

I was impressed. Very impressed.

Hands down, he was one of the brightest, most approachable, interesting people I’ve met in a long time. Add to all of that that he listened and could engage in a two way conversation. He didn’t cower down over rough areas or hype anything. He was just having a great technical discussion.

After talking with him that one time and in a couple follow up emails I soon found out who he was and how other many people had been touched by him too.

It wasn’t just me. This was a remarkable person.

For a moment, I put up there alongside my childhood dream of working at DisneyLand the possibility of working alongside Jim Gray. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know anything about terraservers, which is just one area he focused on. I could learn that, if working with someone like Jim was in the mix.

It was with great shock and sadness that I later found out that Jim Gray was lost at sea. It was a terrible loss to the computer industry. I’m glad that Berkeley and others are working together to honor him.

We should all strive to have a little Jim in us.

Someone is saying something somewhere, because there’s plenty of blog chatter this morning about “will Microsoft saying anything about Windows 7.”

The talk started with this CNet interview with Steve Sinofsky of Microsoft where he said Microsoft was taking a measured approach with Windows 7 communication.

I think Robert Scoble’s response sums up the thoughts of many on this: If you’re not going to say anything, I’m going to look elsewhere for something interesting.

Then on the Microsoft Windows Vista Team Blog, Chris Flores explains Microsoft’s lack of Windows 7 talk further, by explaining that indeed Microsoft is talking with software and hardware partners and that they simply didn’t want to overpromise.

But that’s not the end of it. No sooner had Microsoft said it wasn’t going to say anything, than some are suggesting that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer will be presenting some features of Windows 7 at the D6 Conference, which starts today.

Mary Jo Foley runs with this rumor and predicts that Microsoft will be talking about aspects of Windows 7, including touch.

Larry Dignan chimes in too with a bucket load of skepticism about Touch and Tablet PCs.

My take? Who knows what we’ll be seeing at D6 tonight (6:15PM Pacific Time). With both Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates on stage at the same time, I’d expect to see something very, very cool. Maybe a prototype of the consumer version of a Surface computer? Hmmm. Or maybe something that’s incrementally grown over the years within Microsoft? We’ll all be tuning in. From the D6 website it doesn’t appear that there will be a live video feed (where’s Scoble and his N95 when you need him???), but there is a page on the conference website for videos, so this is probably a good place to monitor.

Steve Gillmor thinks that the way for Microsoft to get to the next stage is for Bill Gates to leave the stage. For some reason he thinks that Gates is holding back innovation within Microsoft.

Give me a break. Microsoft has too many engineers inside to stop anything. Now whether the company capitalizes on it is another matter.

It’s precisley because you see things like TouchWall–which Gillmor suggest Gates is “hyping” up–that I have confidence that Microsoft is at least is in motion and not floating.

Here’s the thing. Microsoft isn’t going to be able to “hold” all our connected data or be a conduit for it. People would scream bloody murder. It’s not going to happen. Now they might enable an enterprise to do so or maybe a group within their network or maybe help Facebook to do so. But there’s no way Microsoft is going to become the conduit–at least not now. Also, don’t forget, Microsoft, not Google, invested in Facebook. So Google has the motivation and mindshare to be able to “devalue” Facebook. Microsoft is caught in the Facebook garden and unlikely to do so. I’m with you though in that I think Microsoft made the wrong move, in that Microsoft should be doing what it can to devalue Facebook–or put more politely enabling others to do what Facebook does. They should have taken this move rather than investing in Facebook. However, they didn’t. So oh well.

What you might see, maybe, are Facebook specific tie ins on Microsoft properties or Microsoft ads on Facebook properties. Not revolutionary, more MSN like than Google like.

Whether Bill Gates encourages research into new models of interacting with computers or not has almost nothing to do with where Microsoft goes next in its networking strategy. The company is way to big for that.

Here again, I fully appreciate Gillmor’s stated implication that Microsoft is lagging in social computing, but it’s having to shake a lot of AOL think.

It’s not technology that’s the issue. It’s business decisions.

Warner Crocker points to this New York Times article on whether Microsoft–or any other company for that matter–has what it takes to keep vibrant. Yep keeping a company up to speed during systemic changes is a difficult task, but so is starting a company, growing it, or shutting it down for that matter. Running a business of any size or stage has its significant challenges. At any given time most people fail. Those are the odds. So the naysayers have the edge on this one.

I think Warner is right though, we’re not talking about some laws of physics here, we’re talking human nature. I think to a degree here we’re talking about the fact that at this point Microsoft doesn’t really know who it is or is at the cusp of deciding whether it should push itself further. Mary Jo Foley kind of asks this question by suggesting that Microsoft shouldn’t be getting into consumer products. It should stick with the post-IBM IT market. Yeah, no doubt Microsoft is very biased towards IT. It is in terms of its databases, languages, Office suite, the way it positions the Tablet PC and UMPC, and on and on. I wouldn’t be surprised that if the Zune sticks around that it ultimately becomes an IT product. Can’t blame them, that’s where the money often is.

Is the IT world a “good enough” business to be in? If the answer is yes to the employees within Microsoft, well, then Microsoft is capped and on a decaying path. As ominous as this sounds, there’s nothing wrong with it. Just ask IBM. They’ve figured it out for themselves.

I know I see a lot more. And I think many others within Microsoft think do too. So this roller-coaster ride isn’t over–by a long shot.

I got a chuckle this morning when I installed the Worldwide Telescope app.

Why? When you install it on a Vista machine you have to install DirectX 9. Thing is that Vista already comes with DirectX 10. So think about this: To get the richest interaction in a showcase app like WWT, you have to “downgrade” your graphics library. All I can say is: Make up your mind. Is DirectX 9 or 10 the state of the art?

If DirectX 9 makes sense in a topnotch app like WWT, then DirectX 9 should be in Vista.

Don’t get me wrong, as a developer I understand and appreciate what’s going on here. It’s just that during this transition period, it’s worthwhile to keep the spotlight on issues like this, so that things don’t get worse.

Downloaded the WorldWide Telescope (WWT) app from Microsoft Research last night. In a word: Beautiful. Highly recommended.

The program lets you fly through the night sky, visiting pictures captured by earth bound telescopes as well as those from Hubble and the like. You can’t visit the surface of Mars at ground level alongside one of the Mars rovers, but you can zoom into a nicely displayed image of Mars which slowly floats across the screen. Yes, everything is moving! It’s cool just to zoom so that Mars or some other planet is in view and sit there and slowly watch it to pan off to the side. To do so, click on “Search” in the toolbar and type whatever planet or star you’d like to zoom to. The Worldwide Telescope does the rest.

Besides visiting a surface like Mars or the moon, one other cool thing I’d like to do with WWT: use it as a spacecraft simulator. Imagine if you could define your own rocket, launch it at a specific time of day, to a specific heading, and then “guide” it to some point in space. That would be cool. Since paths are definable in WWT I imagine there’s some way to do this with the either a helper app or a 3rd party toolbar add on. I see that the team is trying to open up the app to developers in some way, though nothing is available yet.

I’m wondering if the third party access would enable you to add and share your own telescope images–yeah that might make a mess, but then again a WikiTelescope would be kind of cool–especially if you had a picture that made it into the collection.

I’ve been passing the WWT link around all morning and everyone has been excited to hear about the program. At least one person has experiences crashes and can’t run the program. This is on a Vista machine with some classic driver problems. I’m wondering if there isn’t pushing his drivers over the edge again. Hmmm.

At the 2008 Government Leaders Forum Asia on May 9th Bill Gates shared some more of his enthusiasm for the Tablet PCs and more specifically Tablets in education.

“….I’ve got one last thing to show, and I previewed this earlier, and that’s related to the student Tablet. To me this is an important milestone, and Microsoft has been investing in this for a long time. We see lots of ways that we’re going to drive this into the mainstream. In fact, my own daughter goes to a school where she uses a Tablet PC, and it’s phenomenal to see how comfortable she is, how she learns better. She tries out her knowledge, she communicates with her teacher in a new way. It is completely digital. The Internet is there, the ability to create things is there.”

and on technology in schools:

“One of the things that I always share my enthusiasm for when I talk about the future of technology is the idea of students having a computer individually, and later today you’re going to hear from a teacher and a student who are experiencing that, and piloting what that’s like. Clearly that has to be a very robust machine that can last - you can drop it - it’s got to be inexpensive, it’s go to be powerful, but the hardware and software changes make it a question of when we can do that, not a question of if we can do that. Textbooks are on their way out. In some countries, that will happen in three or four years. In some it will be five or six, but I’ll be so bold as to say that over the next decade we’ll look at a textbook the same way we look at things like a paper-based encyclopedia today. And we look at it and we say, hey, it’s not rich enough, it’s not animated, it’s not inexpensive enough, it’s not flexible enough, it doesn’t give you the richness that the digital form of that can provide. And so these advances really make a huge difference.

One that I think is particularly interesting is that the way that we interact with these machines will change. We use the keyboard and the mouse today. On the mobile phone, we largely use the little keyboard, and it’s impressive how well people are able to use that small keyboard. But we should complement that with new approaches, and there’s a number of additional approaches that I refer to as natural interface. Speech input, where you talk and the system recognizes it. Pen, where you take a pen and you write ink, and it recognizes what you’ve written. Touch, where you can just point to things and move them around. A great example of this is that in the future the desk of a worker will be a touch-sensitive surface. The cost of that display and having the software that can see what you’re doing will be very, very low, and so you can take different documents, have them laid out there, point to one, expand it, have the sales data, or the survey data, or the quality data, or the calendar easily manipulable so you can navigate through it just by pointing at things, and then if you see something that surprises you, you can take your pen, write a little note, pick which colleague you think should take a look at that, click on that, and off it goes. And it’s very straightforward.

Likewise, your walls will be able to display information, because the cost of the screen will be very low, and they too will have a camera that can watch what you’re doing with the magic of software. And so your whiteboard, what was the chalkboard, will be intelligent. That will be true in the office, in the meeting room, in the classroom, at home. And so things like taking photos and organizing them, just very natural.

This is the kind of thing you’ve seen in science fiction movies, but in fact it’s now moving into the market, and moving into the market in very low cost. Our first product in this space is called Microsoft Surface. It’s a flat table. And just a few months ago that rolled out to the early customers and the response has been phenomenal that people love that natural capability of interacting.

Well now, with computer technology being so amazing, and so empowering to the individual, how do we get it so that we have broad benefit? Whenever we make scientific advances, we’re faced with this dilemma, and when we have new medicines, are they only for the rich? We go all the way back to look at reading, which of course in its early days only the very elites were literate, and it took hundreds of years before low cost printing, and government programs around libraries and schools got to the point where every country took a goal of saying that all the population deserves to the literate. And the world as a whole, most of the world, has done very, very well on that. Well now we have almost a new type of literacy, digital literacy, and making the computer accessible.”

(Emphasis is mine.)

As I read comments like this I jump inside with excitement. Who knows how long it’s going to take to achieve and whether it all comes out like we think it should, but is there any doubt that we’re going to figure out even more ways to make our lives more efficient, more connected, more enjoyable?

Word is spreading that Microsoft’s Ultra-Low Cost PCs (ULCPCs or ULPCs) pricing program will not support touch.

JKKMobile offers up some choice words/advice for Microsoft.

Let’s be clear though that we’re talking about unnamed, leaked sources here. Also, from what Microsoft mentioned publically earlier, they’re basically offering deep discounts for XP Home. By definition, this exludes Tablet bits (essentially) and domain join. For me, touch gets less interesting at this point. In fact, encouraging touch without Tablet could dilute the Tablet market, I guess. XP Home knocks out schools using these as Tablet PCs in any organized manner as well. I’ve already blogged about my thoughts on this. However, schools can always decide to pay a little extra for the Tablet bits and Vista and a machine that can run it reasonably well. This is just an incentive program.

And we’re really talking about a competitive nudge against Linux. That’s what’s motivating this. We’re not talking about where Microsoft’s heart is. We know no more or less whether Microsoft is committed to low-cost Tablet PCs or Tablet PCs in education.

Of course, the problem here is that in its battle against Linux, Microsoft is going to be discouraging Tablet sales and disouraging the notion that Tablet features should be everywhere. This collision course looks unavoidable. To me, it’s not a question whether Microsoft should be blocking touch on ULCPCs, it’s about whether they should be encouraging Tablets and Tablet features to be low cost. For us Tablet advocates, well, we’ve got more work cut out for us. Now, not only do we have the unwelcome $200+ premium for the digitizers, we have an additional price premium for the OS on the low-end.

Oh well, maybe these low-cost PCs will flop and we can all go back to $1500 UMPCs.

I’ve blogged several times about the over-the-top thinking going on with the TechMeme Leaderboard crowd when it comes to the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo merger. The sensationalism might have encouraged traffic, but much of it sure was borderline business advice. Now that the deal is undone, maybe we can all get back to talking about tech.

Of all the posts I’ve run across, Danny Sullivan gives some of the best perspective on the proposed deal and where things go from here.

I would say that in terms of where I’d like Microsoft to go from here is where I’ve wanted it to go all along. The first step I’d suggest for them is to work with its many MVPs and build an ad system they’d like to use. Start there. It’s simple enough and small enough to keep nimble. I realize that an approach like this doesn’t have the charm that the top 15%, but hey, that’s exactly the thinking that’s gotten Microsoft this far–so it’s time for a change.

I won’t repeat myself yet again why and how this would all work, but it seems so obvious to me.

I’d also recommend to Microsoft to think less in terms of search in the classic Google way, because I don’t even think Google is doing it anymore. There’s more to search than search. Microsoft should think in terms of helping people get to the information that they want to get to and to use it they way they want. I think this suggests more services than just search. Why can’t someone programmatically get to the definition of a word in Live Search? Why can’t they get acceptable hyphenation via a service call? Or just the source code sample on MSDN that use a particular function–again via a call? This type of approach would get a developer like me to use Live “Search.” Is Google really the best at providing reference material? I don’t think so. That’s why Wikipedia had an opening. Microsoft has the same opportunity here, especially if they provide easily reusable components and services, which is something Microsoft is good at.

Virtual Earth is a fairly good example of this. It’s not quite right though if you ask me. Would I point any of my GPS-enabled programmer/bicycling friends to it? No. Why? Because it doesn’t do what they want and to make it do what they want is too much work.

And what about something like math? There’s a reason why my Silverlight-based Math Tip points to Google and not Live Search for getting math results. Microsoft misses the boat here again and makes it too hard to try to even kludge something up. It’s possible, but why bother. Just use Google.

Live Mesh or not, there are tons of these little services that are ideal for Microsoft or Google or Yahoo to do. Maybe some day.