Microsoft May Have Won the Battle but...

We’ve seen many new technologies at Microsoft’s TechEd Eilat 2006.
Microsoft rules our desktops. It keeps pushing on new technologies that will make development and deployment for desktop clients easier and provide richer user experience and shorter time-to-market.

As Microsoft keeps concentrating on desktop clients its competitors, such as Google and Yahoo!, turn to internet-based services as a way to provide all sorts of services to users. By providing basic services that are hosted, maintained, and are usually free or require minimal charge, those companies are leading the trend of web based services over desktop software and that means big competition to Microsoft’s desktop platform.

Although AJAX and web based services have a very big hype now days, Microsoft was actually doing this long ago with Outlook Web Access and Sharepoint but unfortunately failed to realize the full potential of these.

There is a very interesting article at Forbes describing the changes Microsoft is undergoing in order to compete in this new market of web based services: https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/05/01/8375454/index.htm

Note that this is not the first time Microsoft fails to capture the potential of the web.
And some of us still remember a company called Netscape that ruled the web before the giant fro Redmond woke…

The future of this battle should be interesting…