These days, it seems like Microsoft’s business is getting attacked from every angle. What’s most interesting, however, is that the software giant is being challenged the most in those areas that it holds a significant share of the market. From the Mac going after Windows on the desktop, iPhone gunning for (and surpassing by years end?) Windows Mobile devices, Linux infiltrating the server market, and OpenOffice along with Google docs chipping away at the all-mighty Microsoft Office - the big M has many companies to pay attention to these days. As of late, Microsoft has been so busy saying goodbye to Bill Gates chasing its competition, it forgot to show up to a scheduled fight with one of its most feared closest rivals.
“Exchange for the rest of us”:
Let’s see what Microsoft’s identifiable markets are: home users, business users, corporate customers. In an interview on Windows Weekly a few months ago, a Microsoft executive in the online Live division explained how the company sees corporate users also as home users who want to enjoy their computers and have fun with them when not at work (my paraphrase). He noted that it was Microsoft’s goal with Live to unify the experiences of such users. That’s great and all, but just tell me one thing: how does a tech company that has been (incorrectly) relegated by the media to be the best choice for “home users” beat you in making “Exchange for the rest of us”, when Exchange is your own (Microsoft’s) product? It’s so embarrassing that it overshadows Windows Me (the biggest flop to leave Microsoft labs).
Just in case you have been living under a rock for the last few months, that company with the “home user” target market goes by the name of Apple, Inc. You know, the company who is known for turning certain industries upside down and re-inventing the business processes within them. Apple announced MobileMe on June 9, 2008 and dubbed it “Exchange for the rest of us”. That “exchange” reference, as mentioned earlier, is alluding to Microsoft Exchange - a corporate/large-business email and PIM tool/service. MobileMe basically does Exchange but for the consumer - on a personal subscription level. Herein lies the question: how does Apple, a company so focused on the “home user”, roll out something Microsoft should have been selling for the last five years?
You see, somewhere along the lines of Xbox breakdowns, Vista problems/negative PR, and chasing after copying Apple with Zune, Microsoft completely missed the boat. For a nominal fee to the user, Microsoft should have created “Exchange Hotmail”: a paid-for part of Hotmail that “brings your data with you at the speed of *push*” (my marketing tagline). It should have been the scaled down, personal version of Exchange that integrated with Hotmail/Live mail in the cloud, integrated with an Exchange-compatible mobile client, and pushed out to Outlook/Windows Live Mail on the desktop. It would do push email, calendar, and contacts the way Exchange does it, only Joe User would be able to sign up for it himself. But it wasn’t to be. Apple brought it first because Microsoft was too busy defending its “server plays”. Most likely, the big M felt that introducing a personal version of Exchange tied to Hotmail would in some way enroach on its own user base of corporate Exchange users. But that’s just a load of bollocks, since the two markets using Exchange enterprise and my proposed Exchange Hotmail would be different (a corporation would still run an Exchange server for company-wide email and Joe the employee would simply subscribe to Exchange Hotmail for personal use).
On second thought, the company did roll out a scaled down version of its server product for home users dubbed Windows Home server. Why could it not have applied the same type of thinking to an email and PIM system? After all, the new Microsoft is all about software plus services (as described in the linked memo by new Microsoft chief Ray Ozzie). Exchange Hotmail would have been a perfect play for Microsoft. So in the end, Microsoft is left with a very popular online mail solution (Hotmail) yet has not made a significant effort to monetize it. Apple, on the other hand, has beaten Microsoft at their own game and has brought out a kick-butt web service and, along the process, used Microsoft’s “Exchange” moniker in its description - almost as a mokery.
On triple thought, what has Microsoft really done to Hotmail and its consumer online services lately? Sure, they have copied Yahoo! and made Hotmail “drag-and-drop”. But what Apple is really great at doing is making an end-to-end solution, as the comapny has done with iPhone and MobileMe. The latter is the perfect complement for the iPhone user. Microsoft hasn’t seen the light at the end of this tunnel, and the jury is still out to see if it ever will.
P.S. Throughout the article, I put “home user” in quotation marks because for years it has been thought that “home use” was the best use of Apple Macs. Though this opinion is beginning to change rather quickly - and as it should - many uninformed tech journalists, “experts”, and those in tech media still wrongly believe this to be the case.
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2 responses so far ↓
Microsoft already offer push e-mail with Hotmail, and you can use it with custom domains too, for free. You just need the Windows Live client for Windows Mobile, Blackberry etc.
Huh, I didn’t know this. Thanks for the tip! I must say - that’s a nifty feature. So it only works with Windows Mobile 6, is that correct?
Looking at it now and doing a bit more research, it’s a work in progress for both Apple and Microsoft.
1) Microsoft’s Hotmail push, as Paul stated in the preceding comment, only works with Windows Mobile 6 and a Windows desktop client. If it worked with ALL exchange-ready mobile devices, that would be a major plus. As an extra, it would also work with the iPhone 2.0 software, since the iPhone has ActiveSync/Exchange support built-in.
Also, I’m not clear on whether the above Microsoft solution only works with mail or does it also push Hotmail’s contacts and calendars? This would be killer.
The ability to share calendars through the beta version of Hotmail’s calendars would be great as well. It would be the first of its kind - for consumer use.
2) Apple’s MobileMe push seems to only work with the iPhone on the mobile side. On the desktop, the push functionality only works with Mail.App on OS X. The same goes for calendars and contacts. On a Windows PC, however, Outlook does not get MobileMe’s push capabilities. It acts like a regular pull client and pulls mail, calendar, and contacts. Since the iPhone doesn’t support to-do lists in Calendar, I think MobileMe doesn’t sync them either. Bummer. (But I use Jott.com for lists anyway, so it’s less of an issue).
3) Google can beat both Apple and Microsoft to the punch here and be the “no vested interest” provider of push support. They can do this by simply adding push technology to Gmail and Gcalendar. Obviously, they will need to also add push support for Gmail’s contacts feature.
By doing this, Google will have a platform-agnostic solutions to push PIM that high-tech users will flock to. And they can even use these push capabilities for their new (yet delayed) Android platform.