The power of Microsoft's branding is so great that slapping the labels 'Live' and 'Office' on a piecemeal bundle of rehashed services seems to have the whole world agog. The evidence doesn't justify the excitement. Today's beta of Office Live is a repackaging of various web presence offerings that Microsoft previously tried (and largely failed) to market under the bcentral brand for a number of years.
Let's assume just for a second, though, that providing small businesses with an entry-level web presence really is a great platform from which to develop and launch the future of a new generation of web-native business productivity applications (I don't suppose it is, but hold that thought for just a few more seconds). Microsoft's problem is that it doesn't understand that delivering a service means a lot more than simply putting some software tools online; it means providing something that brings results. Microsoft should take a look at companies like WebSite Pros, who I wrote about last fall:
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