Microsoft Resets

With the Windows Live announcement yesterday, Microsoft begins its next great charge-from-behind, this time in the web-page-as-platform arena. In two years, I imagine, it will have a industry lead offering, and dozens of today's "Web 2.0" start-ups (I'm looking right at you writely.com) will be little more than bullet-points on Valley techie resumes -- except for the ones that have the luck to be bought by Google.

The really interesting thing to see in the next two or three years will be to what extent Microsoft can push Vista-only content (.NET 2.0+ enabled websites), given the fact that Vista will soon be pre-installed on all new PC's with live.com as the default home page. Just when we thought AJAX and OpenOffice and Linux and Mono were going to help us escape our Redmond addiction, I wonder if Microsoft is about to redefine the software market en masse in its favor.

Anyway, since Office Live doesn't seem to be a free replacement for Office (though I can't tell what it actually is), I'll be using Thinkfree Office Online for quite some time.

Not everyone finds this stuff interesting. Here is Elias's reaction to Microsoft's industry-changing announcements: