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Some quick thoughts on the Windows Live Session I attended in London last Thursday. I haven’t been keeping up that much with Live since the announcement, but found the presentation by Phil Holden, director Windows Live, informative and interesting. (Hey, I need to get some beta invites to the Live services. Mail me!)

First, the web is the platform. Not Google, Yahoo or MSN as portals with multiple services. Developers are either using the web or specific services, like Amazon for e-commerce, as their platform. Compared with the PC world I’d say that the web is Windows and the most popular web services in each vertical are individual applications like Photoshop and Excel. The portals are like Office, and you see most plug-ins built on top of one specific application in the suite, not on the suite as such.

If you call it vertical or horizontal integration doesn’t really matter, the really interesting stuff is in interopability between services from different providers. Thinking in terms of a supply chain can be tricky on the web. Instead of starting ‘upstream’ with access to raw materials, you start ‘downstream’ with access to user attention. And not all services are on the same horizontal layer. Search, e-mail (possibly IM) and a start page (my.whatever.com or a generic one) I consider to be the closest to the consumer in such a chain. B2C, auctions, listings etc are better described as being further ‘upstream’. I.e. Freemont to me seems to be vertically integrated rather than horizontally. It would be more interesting to be able to leverage the knowledge in my MSN Messenger network on listings from eBay, Craigslist and Monster, rather than only on ads on Freemont.

What I missed about Freemont especially and the other services as well was the limited talk about business models. To be able to break free from the standard ad formats and at the same time become really profitable, business models innovation is really important. One of the key reasons why Google is successful is its application and continous improvement of search advertising on top of a very good search service. While I see that Freemont could become a very good platform for trading old goods and services, I didn’t see any real thinking on the business model that could allow it to scale. (I assume such thinking is being done, but not revealed to outsiders.)

The Live services defintely seemed better than the current crop of MSN stuff, but it seemed to be more about operational efficiency than strategic advantages. Don’t really see how Live is different in a strategic sense, rather it seems (like with offerings from Google, Yahoo!) to be about to some making sure that rivals don’t get to dominate sectors that could become important.

Still, excellence in one important area has created a lot of value in both Google and eBay. I think MSN could gain a lot from reaching excellence in mail and communications. Especially mail is an important tool that is working sub-optimally today and MSN has a lot to win from making mail a much better experience.

As always, a great thing about the Live Session was talking to the other people attending (Tom, the Mess.be team, LiveSide and more). The really interesting stuff began after the formal presentation was over and everyone had a beer and started chatting. Which is nothing new.

More about the Session at other blogs:

i-Wisdom
A Welsh View
MSBlog
LiveSide

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 29th, 2006 at 12:39 am and is filed under Internet, The Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.