Microsoft, a anuntat marti, intentia de a lansa pe piata doua noi produse, Windows Live si Office Live, deocamdata in varianta Beta, care vor ataca piata on line, informeaza Reuters. Noile produse on line sunt gratuite si ofera facilitati similare motoarelor de cautare Google sau Yahoo: servicii de cautare, e-mail, stiri, foto, audio etc.
Windows Live poate fi accesat la adresa http://www.live.com
Articol Reuters:
Microsoft shifts to ad-backed Web software services
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software maker, said it will make a strategic shift by offering software with online services, a move analysts said was prompted by competition from Google and other rivals.
Outlining what it said was its biggest strategy change in five years, the Redmond, Washington-based company told analysts and reporters on Tuesday that it would deliver many of its key products and services online, some supported by advertising, as well as by selling subscriptions or licenses for software installed on computers.
Windows Live and Office Live will give users some of the basic features of the software giant's two most-profitable products, but without the complexity of installing and maintaining the software in computer hard drives.
"We are trying to put a 'services plus software' mentality into many many of the product groups inside Microsoft," said Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect.
Microsoft also said it planned to fold many well-known products in its MSN division into a new brand called Windows Live. The move will combine its instant-messaging service, a new online e-mail service replacing Hotmail, Web security, data storage and other features, all available via the Internet.
The software giant is trying to defend its mainstay Windows and Office software franchises by borrowing from ideas used by challengers such as Google, Salesforce.com, WebEx, Yahoo Inc. and scores of start-ups.
While most of these rival programs have tiny audiences relative to Microsoft's hundreds of millions of Office users, the simplicity and power of Web-based software has captured the imagination of many software developers across the industry.
"(Microsoft) clearly gets where the focus of the competition needs to be," said Tim O'Reilly, publisher and software design guru, on the sidelines of the event.
"There are going to be some fabulous new services. But whether they are built by Microsoft or by Yahoo or Google or Salesforce remains to be seen," O'Reilly said.
Ad-Supported Software
Three tiers of service will be offered, starting with a free, advertising-supported one. The company will also offer a second tier with more features with a low-cost subscription fee and a premium priced, full-featured tier for services that users regularly rely on.
Windows Live is a free Web-based service in which individual users can sign up for a "live" home page that pulls in constantly updating content from a range of information sources including Web searches, e-mail, syndicated headlines from other sites and photos and audio from across the Web.
Office Live will give smaller companies access to many of the features in Microsoft's collection of programs for business tasks, as well as the ability to maintain corporate e-mail accounts and data.
This Microsoft service competes with Salesforce, which has hundreds of companies developing custom applications and sharing them with others over a similar small-business system.
Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff dismissed the moves, saying that Microsoft's relevance was waning a decade after Gates declared that the company's future lay with the Internet in a milestone strategy speech on December 7, 1995.
"The real innovators on the Internet: Amazon, eBay, Google, Salesforce.com -- have all succeeded because Microsoft has let us down on innovation," Benioff said.
The pay-per-click advertising system pioneered in the dot-com era by Overture and fine-tuned by Google has created a new way of supporting innovative services and software on the Web, Microsoft executives said.
"Google has done an amazing job of making that ad engine click on eight cylinders. We have all learned quite a bit from them," Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's recently named chief technical officer said. "They and we have barely scratched the surface."
Microsoft is testing its own adCenter software in France and Singapore and will begin offering it for use by advertisers and partner Web sites worldwide over the next year, he said.
"We currently have about a 10 percent share of the online market. We fully intend to grow this share," Ozzie said.
"This advertising model has emerged as a very important thing," Gates said. "We want all software developers to tap into these models," he said of how many start-ups now depend on advertising from rival Google to fund their new Web projects.
The new initiative also reflects a recent company-wide reorganization at Microsoft that put MSN under the Windows division and put Ozzie in charge of Microsoft's efforts to deliver software services over the Web.
(Additional reporting by Reed Stevenson in Seattle)
