In 2004 Microsoft completely owned tech consumers. Over 95% of consumers used Microsoft OS based computers with MS Office. 91% of consumers used Microsoft Internet Explorer to access the web, and held a segment leading 33% of webmail with MS Hotmail. The past 6 years have been a disaster for MS on the web due to a terrible lack of focus on overall consumer experience. IE market share has fallen below 60%, while Hotmail has dropped to 22%.
Back in 2008 Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie knew that his strategy was broken. Internet startup were threatening MS’s core product areas. Google’s launch of Gmail in 2004 immediately stole market share from Hotmail, while Google Docs posed a direct threat to MS Office. In response Ray wrote his infamous Mesh Memo.
For Ray’s vision to work, Microsoft needed to transition their core products from being beautiful standalone products, to interconnected web services. As Ray said [Our mission is to provide], “seamless experiences that combine the power of the internet, with the magic of software, across a world of devices.” Someone forgot to tell the product managers. Instead of transitioning their products, Microsoft simply created more products.
Today MS has two products for every type of content; the legacy desktop tool, or a newer web tool. After creating some content, I can choose to save the content on my computer, or on the cloud (via SkyDrive). Later, if I want to edit content, the legacy desktop tools can only reliably pull content from my desktop, while the web tools pull data from SkyDrive. That’s not seamless. To bridge the gap between these tools, Microsoft created yet another tool called Mesh to synchronize desktop files with SkyDrive files. This solution could work, but Microsoft effectively killed any utility of the product by creating a 5 gig limit in its usage (the cloud solution has a 25 gig limit). So how does this play out in practice?
Over Thanksgiving I took 600 photos with my Nikon DSLR camera. These photos took over 2.5 gigs of space which I transferred to my desktop. I viewed and touched up these photos with Windows Live Photo Gallery. I then wanted to share these photos with my relatives. Mesh isn’t an effective choice because one weekend of photos is 50% of total capacity. Skydrive isn’t effective because Photo Gallery can’t view the photos after they are saved. UGH!
Microsoft can get itself out of this mess by reviewing Ray’s 2.5 year old memo and building usable seamless experiences. This means either killing Mesh, or making it unlimited. If MS kills mesh, they need to fully integrate SkyDrive into all desktop products (not just saving). SkyDrive also needs a premium tier for additional storage space. In a world where everyone has a TB hard drive, the idea of limiting me to 25 gigs of hard drive space is silly. Last, the product management for the desktop and web tools needs to be unified.
If MS doesn’t do these things, someone else will. Oops, someone just did! And Ray? He got so frustrated with MS he quit.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Ryan Born // Dec 1, 2010 at 12:10 am
Nice post. The image sharing experience on a digital drive or any drive for that matter is really poor. I truly don’t feel that users want to share images via drive, even if it’s cloud based. Have you ever shared or been shared images via Dropbox? The experience stinks. Image sharing sites solve this problem, as much as I hate to plug them, Flickr wins here and for less than $50 per year for unlimited storage it’s the way to go. Just upload privately and share specific events with friend and family. Smugmug is a decent alternative as well. There are benefits to both services. Lastly, just a little photo tip, don’t shoot on the whole chip of your DSLR – just shoot at 4MP or so – that’s all you’ll really need for personal photos. The extra MP are just eating up space on your HD.
2 Aziz Gilani // Dec 5, 2010 at 2:15 am
My wife swears by a few photo sharing sites, and WLPG has a bulk publish tool that makes the uploads a snap. I just find the UI for most of them pretty kludgy.
The UX for Mesh is pretty darn good, even my mom can use it! Really a shame that MS crippled the service with the low size limit.
My broader point is about how MS has screwed up across the board though. Google docs is able to thrive because MS refuses to understand that saving to the cloud isn’t enough, you need to be able to pull docs from the cloud as well.
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