NOTE: any non-US residents who want the entire story - mail me offline. ASIDE: I'm reading The Microsoft File - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0812927168/o/qid=911236109/sr=2-2/002 -8239053-4673402 - not a ton of surprises, after reading Hard Drive - except for IBM's ignoring internal advice (buy 40% of MSFT) and MSFT's blatent "say one thing do another" actions RE OS/2. Original impetus for the first anti-trust investigation was it appeared that IBM and MSFT were divvying up the OS markets between OS/2 and Windows. Also, didn't realize that Q-DOS contained code from CP/M and IBM paid Kinkaid <?sp> $800,000 because of it. Where Microsoft Wants You to Go The New Strategy: Keeping Web Surfers Busy With Series of MSN Sites http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/11/biztech/articles/16microsoft-msn.h tml The latest Internet initiative from Microsoft Corp. is an all-in-one service that combines news, information, shopping, bulletin boards and electronic mail. Even its name sounds familiar: MSN. Of course, MSN was originally the banner for one of Microsoft's most embarrassing missteps, a subscription-based online service meant to crush America Online. But that service, introduced three years ago, was slow, full of bugs and hard to use, and it fell far behind the competition -- on one side from America Online and on the other from the emerging World Wide Web. -SNIP - But while the new MSN has the seeming advantage of being reachable by a single mouse click from the Internet Explorer browser that comes loaded on every new Windows PC, it remains uncertain how many Web surfers will choose to make that click. After all, the initial MSN online service also had the enviable asset of a start button on the main screen of Windows 95. Microsoft's biggest advantage in its Web effort, however, may be the popularity of some of its individual Web sites. Most notably, the Hotmail e-mail service that Microsoft bought last year signs up 150,000 new users a day. Taken together, the Microsoft sites constitute the third-most-popular network on the Internet after America Online and Yahoo, according to Media Metrix, the rating service based in New York. Not that all this was planned. Microsoft is the master of the so-called ready-fire-aim business model. The company introduces a hastily conceived product and then, through a war of attrition affordable perhaps only to a company with a stock-market value of $274 billion, methodically hunts down the bugs until a version of the product finally wins the minds, if not the hearts, of the computing masses. ----------- commentary: look, they bought HotMail and now LinkExchange, all for MSN. MSFT gets a % of all sales from sites on MSN. MSN will be one click off MSIE. MSIE is bundled with Win98. Hel-lo -- using established product/channels to enter new markets [retail sales/internet mall] .... why does this seem so bloody *obvious* ... but not acted upon? kathy > Kathy E. Gill > DCAC/MRM Production Visibility Support -- 425.234.2004, pager 425.568.0195 > The biggest mistake people make in life is not trying to make a living at > doing what they most enjoy. ~ Malcomb S. Forbes > Microsoft Exchange: the perfect name for its users' greatest desire! > ____________________________________________________________________ -------------------------------------------------------------------- Join The Web Consultants Association : Register on our web site Now Web Consultants Web Site : http://just4u.com/webconsultants If you lose the instructions All subscription/unsubscribing can be done directly from our website for all our lists. ---------------------------------------------------------------------
