...when I tell him this frightens me.
Mr Gates made a point of dwelling on blogs and said that although they started in the technical community and have come to be a broader social phenomenon, businesses can use them too. They had advantages over more traditional ways of keeping in touch such as e-mail and websites, he said. E-mail messages could be too imposing or miss out key people who should be included, said Mr Gates. Websites were a problem too, he added, because they demand that people visit them regularly to find out if anything has changed and require regular updating to avoid going stale. These problems could be solved, said Mr Gates, by using blogs and Real Simple Syndication (RSS), that lets people know when a favourite journal is updated. "What blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to communicate," he said. "The ultimate idea is that you should get the information you want when you want it." {...}Microsoft currently does not make any individual blogging tools but it is widely expected to move into this space soon. If it does the move would pitch it into even sharper competition with Google and others such as AOL.I don't want Microsquash in this market. I really, really, really don't. Gates has a habit of throwing money around to gain access to the pie du jour for his sticky fingers. I don't want him goofing up the blogging market with his gobs of cash. For months now, I've been bitching about Blogger. It's a pretty low-tech excursion---or at least it used to be. But all that's changed in the last two weeks. I adore Blogger now that they've done the upgrade. I now have permalinks. I have comments. I have a nifty template, but most of all, I have free hosting. Blogger is free because they're ad-revenue based. Now I read I get free photo hosting as well. I have no idea how long Google's munificence is going to last---I'm assuming that at some point in time they'll start charging for all of this stuff, but right now I'm taking it while I can. But if nerdboy wants into this market, well, that changes things. The husband, Mr. IT Strategy, tells me this is nothing to worry about. That anything Microsquash comes up with will mainly be for business apps, and they'll eventually lose money because other services---Google---are offering this service for free. He says that I should look at the history of IM'ing to see what will ultimately happen with blogs. I dunno. What happens in the meantime and what sort of turmoil will the rest of us have to suffer through because nerdboy wants to rule the world? {hat tip: Adam Curry} Posted by Kathy at May 1, 2004 11:02 AM | TrackBack