Microsoft Monitor: Making Room for My Space

"I would like to see Microsoft take more of this kind of approach, of providing a baseline experience for the greatest number of users while offering the flexibility power users and geeks would want, too. My expectation is that if MSN Spaces is as popular as Microsoft claims, and I have no reason for doubt, the company might just make 'simple' a stronger product development criteria."

Well, I try to keep an open mind about such things (really), but based on my experience so far MSN Spaces sucks.

I mean, if nobody had heard of blogging before. If Blogger and dozens of other such free services didn't already exist, then MSN Spaces would be rather cool. As a "me too" effort I expect more from a company with billions to spend on such things. It will be interesting to watch how they improve the service, and of course they will have millions of users if they do nothing but provide the basics.

As Wilcox says there are people who don't want to edit HTML or edit anything for that matter. Pick a template and go. Both MSN spaces and Blogger now allow you to store 30 megs or so of pictures. Is that enough? For e-mail the battle is measured in Gigs, even though the comparison right now is .25 for MS and 2.5 for Google. Seems like I should at least be able to store 100 megs of pictures on these services, not to mention sound files, videos and so forth. Neither MSN or Google seem to be too aggressive in allowing these other types of data. (Update: I just noticed that Blogger now allows 300M of photos, so I'll be less worried about overloading that feature now.)

Google just outright bought Blogger, rather than develop it from scratch. This is normally the Microsoft approach and it has its advantages and disadvantages. Maybe Blogger needs to be rethought a bit so that novice users are more comfortable with it, maybe MSN Spaces need more "pro" type features. Hopefully there will continue to be a nice selection of such services that are free (because the free services establish the baseline on which the for-pay services build) and fiercely competitive with one another. I've tried many of them and so far I like Blogger the best, in spite of its own limitations.

Now, off to try Yahoo360, or whatever it's called.

PS: Here is one way in which Blogger leads... they have a Word interface before Microsoft does:

Blogger: Download Blogger for Word