Microsoft Live, Lemmings
I remember Bill Gates once said that the press adore Google, but Microsoft is ignored. I agree with the big G on that one, and here’s a good example why.
I received a neat little ‘post card’ inside my Entrepreneur magazine yesterday (May 2006 issue - we’re a little behind in Australia). The post card was from Microsoft. Reading the back they said they could get me a *free* web site including domain name, hosting, email, web stats, “and more”. So I checked out the site:”http://www.officelive.com” for details.
Scanning the feature list I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow.
* Email is hosted through Hotmail with 2Gb storage per account (GMail is still 1Gb yeh?).
* Hosting offers 10Gb bandwidth! With 30Mb storage.
* Can’t afford site design? Easy, use the integrated site designer complete with ready made templates.
They look to have an awesome offering there. I had not heard much about this offer previously despite reading a fair waft of stuff online every day.
The offering is still in beta and I suspect the MS PR machine will speed up once the beta is over. Still, to me at least, this highlights the incredibly incestuous nature of the press, blogs, and networks in general.
I remember reading about a music study once where two groups of people had to rank a selection of music from best to worst. The first group made their rankings and then the second group. The second group though, was provided the rankings of the first group. Suprise suprise, the second groups rankings had a stronger correlation than the first group.
OK, so it was only one study. Still, there’s no denying the lemming nature.
