Whats new this week?

With all my community and business stuff I have not had a chance to touch Vladville in a few hours and some of you noticed, thank you for writing. Here is the scoop on a few things I'm watching (hold down CTRL in Firefox and click away): Microsoft appears to be releasing a new device, Project Origami. Interesting part is that it runs full version of Windows (not Windows Mobile) so it might be the ultimate mobile productivity device. Of course, plenty of rumors around on this being the portable Xbox (Xpad), the mp3 player that will kill iPod, cure for the common cold… you know the drill. On the subject of humility, it must be rough over at live.com. Their new Office Live project by all accounts of those of us in the beta program is just a miserable failure. It is very nice of Microsoft to give people interested in beta testing this product a free license (even to the premium services) but so far everyone that has seen it has been disappointed. It is slow, it is not very feature-rich, it is not overly intuitive and with all the promise it has been hyped with it lives up more to the bCentral rehash than a new way to do business with Microsoft productivity applications. It is still in beta so things may change but they may have to change drastically for it to be worth the second (or for some of you even first) look. One of my friends that helps with the Microsoft Campus Start program got a chance to meet with me this week and he was pretty insightful about whats going on: "Vlad, its all about the free domain name. I'll hop on just for that, even though I have no intent to ever use it." Is that a smart strategy, instead of spending a lot on advertising spend about $4-5 a year per account to draw them in on domain alone. If thats the thinking, its brilliant, $5 to acquire a new account is an amazing deal, lets hope they have a strategy to actually convert on that account once it is there. Now on how to execute well: Google Pages. It launched earlier this week as Beta and is already leaps and bounds ahead of Microsoft. No extended signup process, no credit card or verification (for what is a free account anyhow) no confusing schemes. You just log in and start creating web pages in a simple WYSIWYG. If you're wondering how to pronounce that, it is wizy-wigg, but I'm getting off topic which is: simplicity. Sometimes it works (virtually everything Google does) and sometimes it fails miserably (Google Talk). This is why so many products succeed and fail over bad strategy: certain applications should be as simple and minimalistic as possible and get out of the way of the user trying to get work done. Others need big flashy graphics, features, toys, widgets, simleys and need to be infinitely extensible and flexible. With exception of Talk, Google does this better than anyone else. And with all the talk of web applications and stratigery, here is something you can use right now to impress the masses: use a web app to create pretty web forms. Enjoy the rest of your weekend, SBS Show comes out tomorrow.