Is this the end of web development as we know it?

www.officelive.com

Interesting development from microsoft!!
It'd be interesting to hear what people who work in the industry think of this!

Tom

its just a new product on market and thats it, its not the end of web development

WHY?

btw: nice site and portfolio

It's the "as we know it" part that I was referring to!

Microsoft will be offering free domain name & website with their office live product!

Personally I think this will blow a lot of the smaller companies out of the water!

Even our own hosting business I reckon will suffer, as I reckon microsoft will insist on hosting with them and prevent use with other hosting providers.

The numer of small companies that will take this on will be huge (imo)

I really just wanted to see what other people thought about it!

PS thanks for nice comments

Tom

I think if MS came up with this 5 years ago, maybe they would have something

Have you ever built a web site with MS products?

Nothing to fear...

Nope, but I used to use product that dominated their markets, e.g. Netscape, WordPerfect, etc.

You think MS could move more solidly into development products or, for that matter, buy the leaders if they really want a big piece of that market segment?

Bottomline is: if MS feels threatened or want it... they will likely dominate no matter what they have to do. (Count on Bill Gates' paranoia for this).

MS has been trying to dominate this market for years. They have met with limited success because they *ignore* standards and dumb-down their products too much to be very useful. This lack of support translates to lousy return online because... well... your template site looks like a template! It comes off as amaturish. The one exception being FrontPage which can deliver awsome results for advanced users but developers at that level tend to use Macromedia/Adobe products instead because of the graphics support.

Also, many web designers consider MS to be the evil empire which is part of why I'm sprised to see so much MSN support from SEOs. Very related/overlapping industries with very different personalities.

Yep... I use DreamWeaver, but I bet there are more pages being developed with FrontPage than DW. The pros use the likes of DW but the masses use FP. If MS wants the pro market they could....

I don't think they could take the pro market. They would need to come up with a strong graphics program to start. Also look at the browser wars. Sure IE is #1 but it is losing market share to open source products, especially FF. And that started with web developers sick of MS $#!t. And look at the web servers - that market is dominated by Apache. MS has also been losing OS to open source linux variants. Even Mac took a good bite out of them.

MS reputation is tarnished among professionals whos job is to know that MS is lousy with security, support and all things new. MS doesn't support standards. And they do these things to *control* markets which is read as controlling the users in those markets.

Is it posible for MS to overcome this? Sure. But it would take a hell of an effort to change public perception and that would start on the inside. And there again, that doesn't look likely as swarms of MS employees are jumping over to Google...

The best way for MS to get into a new professional market is to minimize their brand, something historicly unheard of at MS. They would have to purchase and existing company, like Adobe, and then not mess with it, so their ownership of that market would be on paper only - not in perception.

My $.02

So, uh... how did this start?

All you have said is true. My true feelings is that MS will not go heavy into anything that does not drive volume sales revenue or protect MS' dominance in an associated sector.

I don't think they will look to the pro market anytime soon. Side note: MS can use their pocket change to buy Adobe.

I know MS has the mony... But it would be a hollow victory if they can't brand it and push it through their other products. It would be a "paper victory" and there's no prestigue or glamor in that. The stock market probably wouldn't even notice...

To be honest, it's not the web development and design side that concerns me. I reckon it will be mainly people with small budgets that will use the basic facility.

It's the spin offs that us wed developers have come to enjoy.... Domain names, hosting etc.....
I have a lot of small clients that are paying for my bread and butter with small hosting accounts and domain names.



Tom