Microsoft's Live gamble

Microsoft's Live gamble

SAN FRANCISCO - Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Chief Technology Officer Ray Ozzie presided over chaos at a meet to unveil a host of web services including Windows Live and Office Live.

For starters the show was unusually long and the demos that were to be shown failed to take off and Ray Ozzie was unusually silent while his engineers - poor souls- worked furiously at sorting out the mess. Then just before the demos were scheduled to begin, the Internet went blip and there was another delay before things were set right again.

But they did manage to convey a message that Microsoft was willing to take that extra step to take on Google. It is the ultimate irony that Google is leading the way when it was Microsoft which was doing the same just a couple of years ago. How the mighty have fallen!

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That apart, Microsoft's Live Software does promise to be a step in the right direction, but then again, if the chaos witnessed at the meet is anything to go by, then Redmond faces tough times indeed. Analysts say as much, "This is Microsoft moving toward offering [all of its] software as a service. Microsoft will ease into it because they don't want to give up the product revenue before the services revenue can ramp up," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst for the research firm Enderle Group in San Jose.

But the Live Software version does appear as an after thought to Yahoo's service. But where both Google and Yahoo fail to take that extra step is that they do not have the extensive as well as the exhaustive network that is at Redmond's disposal.

"That's pretty compelling technology. That will be harder for Yahoo and Google to do because they don't have access to the innerworkings of the OS like Microsoft," agreed Van Baker, a research vice president at Gartner.

So the die has been cast, however haphazardly, Microsoft will not easily surrender its advantage.