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Microsoft Late To Online Game

Microsoft is so late to the game, sometimes it's not even worth talking about. Web search, this new music player, a new music service, MSN Spaces (which is supposed to be a social network)--and now, predictably, an online video service. Has Microsoft ever come out on top? Why does it even bother? YouTube, Guba, Revver, Google Video, Yahoo Video and AOL Video are already out there, and history illustrates that the company that gets to the masses early is almost always impossible to beat. In this build or buy Web 2.0 universe, News Corp. has already showed us that it's much smarter to buy than build. So why, Microsoft's shareholders should ask, do you bother with this thing called Soapbox? Given your cash flow ($34 billion), you could spend intelligently right now, too. Perhaps Microsoft is always late to the party because if it came out with user-generated content, it would be sued. MarketWatch points out that Bill Gates has said his company would be sued if it tried to pull off what YouTube is doing. He might be right. Ah, the perils of being a massive corporate behemoth. There is certainly less freedom to try new things when you're as visible as Microsoft, and everybody wants to gun you down. But does that mean you should purposefully try to enter the game late?

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