Gates: close to a million people on MSN Spaces
January 7 2005
Via Scobleizer:
Well, actually I think the biggest blogging statistic I know, which really blew me away, is that we've got close to a million people setting up blogs (Web logs) with the Spaces capability that's connected up to Messenger.(From CNET interview with Bill Gates, January 5, 2005)
I made this comment on Scoble's blog, here for y'all as well...
Not to take this too far afield, but this is one of those fascinating examples of how MS is so good at staying "on message", but how bad it makes them look when that message lacks credibility. Those of us in the blogging community look at this "1 million" number with an extremely crooked eye, no offense to Mike Torres and his work. We all know someone who created an MSN Space only for the purpose of checking it out, and will never use it again. We know there are people who blog elsewhere that created Spaces because it's more free web space. We know that there are "people" who created more than one space, just like "people" have more than one Hotmail account. But BillG says "1 million" and the choir says "yea, verily."
I had a debate recently with a 'softie over an MS public case study. The MS employee insisted that the case study outlined the business case for a migration away from the product I am responsible for, despite most everyone in the industry knowing that it was a political decision. I met with a customer about a year ago who said their CIO was quoted in an MS case study for Active Directory deployment, when they actually hadn't rolled it out beyond IT in their organization. And I see MS presentations quote questionable research well after it has been debunked in the market.
It's a fascinating culture to observe from the outside, and it often works. But when the claim is too far afield, it does nothing to help the corporate image and credibility. (In this case, neither did BillG's comment in the same interview that "So no big problem; it's not that people have stopped using IE").
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Carl http://www.iminstant.com | 1/7/2005 4:47:34 PM
I wonder about the 1 million workplace seats I recently saw quoted, I haven't come across a customer yet using it in production, and not too many more with pilots of 10-50 people, but that may just be the customers I come across. Remember how many partners and customers we had for eSuite? Hell we even had a deal with AOL...
Microsoft reminds me very very much of IBM of the 60s and 70s. If Watson said it, it must be true. IBM ended up having to do a lot of soul searching come the 90s, it will be interesting to see if Microsoft ends up having to do the same.
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Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 1/7/2005 4:59:54 PM
There are customers with large numbers of seats in production, like Manulife. There's a large airline in your country of origin, too, in rollout. The Workplace project office is pretty busy. So, they are out there. Maybe not in the countries/regions where you are, but they are there.
we had eSuite partners? really?
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Philip Storry | 1/7/2005 6:05:54 PM
The Microsoft culture is absolutely fascinating to observe, though.
My first job in the industry (and I'm showing my lack of age) was supporting Windows 95 in its public beta and initial sales splurge in the UK. Every support technician had to be, according to the contract, a Windows 95 MCP. So, after having been trained in support by Microsoft employees, reading much "Microsoft Partner Only" material, and supporting it for a few months - we prepared for our exams.
And before we went on them, we were taken to one side, and spoken softly to:
"Look, there are sme questions on this exam... Well, they're going to be difficult. You need to remember that this exam isn't for people with your level of knowledge. This exam... Is kind of like an advert. So, for instance, when it asks if Windows is a 32 bit operating system, you should say yes. I know it's not. You know it's not. Everyone in this team knows it isn't. But the exam... The exam thinks it is. The exam also thinks Windows 95 doesn't use DOS. And that 16-bit network stacks don't exist. And that all printer ports are ECP. And..."
I found this hilarious. We passed the exam because we were effectively given the list of "Microsoft Messages". They had nothing to do with reality, but everything to do with advertising and the exam...
Thankfully, a less than a year later I'd begun supporting a whole range of other products - including this strange new one called Lotus Notes 3.33. It was the most frustrating product I'd ever used - big, slow, and yet there was something about it... Something I'd not yet figured out. That bugged me. I kept at it. Eventually, I got it. And I knew what I wanted to work with, because it was the most novel, exciting, practical and useful thing I'd ever seen running on a computer.
Ironically, I left that same company because they made a large committment to throwing out their old host-based UNIX/Mainframe systems and replacing it with a nationwide Microsoft-based system. I knew that their network wouldn't quite handle that - the WAN link to our building barely coped with all our SQL Server traffic, and was fairly typical of all their links. But worse, I knew that this meant I would be the guy looking after the few Domino servers that their customers required, and that nobody else cared about. Domino was never going to be a big product for them, it was just going to be a occasional contractual requirement.
The company fell for the Microsoft line completely, and spent millions rolling out Microsoft technologies. It didn't help them, though - there were no cost savings, and the company had never been that efficient anyway. They were finally subsumed into a their parent megacorp, who had bought them a while back and finally lost patience with them. (The megacorp had planned to wait until they made a profit, then float them on the stock market for resale.) I can't prove that spending millions on rip & replace migrations to unreliable platforms helped this failure significantly... But I have my suspicions... ;-)
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Ed Fisher | 1/7/2005 9:00:06 PM
From Bill Gates interview on Gizmodo; seems like he is pretty honest about your usage comments:
Gates: I've got the RSS plug-in [for Outlook]. I used it a lot when I started out, and now a lot of the blogs I read are where people have sent me emails and said, hey, I ought to look at this. I'm very big... I want to always go to five or six sites on a regular basis so that I can track over time what's new about them.
I think blogging is super-important and we've got to do a lot more software. The phenomena for us is we've got in beta this MSN Spaces thing, and it lets you leverage everything you do around Messenger—that's your buddy lists and those relationships—to set up blogs, and who has access, and who gets notified. We've got up over a million people [who] set up blog sites. Now, how many of those people keep those up to stay... but still, it's a very big number.
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al | 1/9/2005 1:29:34 PM
To be fair every major vendor I work with tries to case study their products in the most tenuous of early deployment scenario's, MS and IBM included. There's always plenty of marketing funding flying around. The worst I saw was a Unisys case study for a major bank with Exchange 2003 on their ES7000 hardware. 6 months later we started rolling out Exchange for them.... on HP kit. Unisys had been a small consideration way back during initiation....
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Brian Benz http://www.softwaresoapbox.com | 1/10/2005 11:30:01 AM
Perhaps they call them spaces for a good reason....Quantum physics will tell you that in space, something that looks like one several objects is actually the same object in many places, until it is observed, then it looks like one object.
In other words, the number of actual objects in the space is dependent on the observer....
You bring up some good points, though I have seen the same behavior from the Lotus side of the world.
At one Lotusphere a law firm case study was done and shown about their KM successes with Discovery Server and K-Station and the such - and after digging deep, they never got past pilot.
Another example, we often hear of many Websphere success storys and the difference between the salesperson's reality and the reality of deployment in those Firm's is usually a large gap.
Not a big deal, though when others point to the case study and say - "why are they ahead of us?" - and then you find out it wasn't all 'truth' - it is frustrating.