Microsoft is playing catchup on the web apps side with a big relaunch of Hotmail (now with Live!) today.
Sphere re-orgs its home page around its strength in social news.
Google buying Simply Hired? And updating Finance…
CNN making debates available to public. This makes so much sense it’s ridiculous anyone thinks otherwise.
Google command line search and Gadget Ads.
Obama actually led the way by urging media companies to take that stance.
Hopefully, others will follow CNNs lead – and not only make their Presidential debates coverage public, but all major political events covered that will be of historical significance.
Is Microsoft really playing catch up here? Look at the numbers:
http://news.com.com/Too+Hotmail+to+handle/2009-1038_3-6181300.html?tag=nefd.lede
And note that Hotmail is the only large scale web mail provider out of beta with AJAX, not to mention full Outlook synchronization – not POP. Looks to me like Microsoft is leading actually 😉
Let’s see now:
Gmail had POP from the beginning and offered 1Gig of storage. Gmails POP supported Outlook, Outlook Express and dozens of other e-mail programs from the start.
Microsoft bumped storage for Hotmail several times to match Gmail. Now they are adding Outlook synchronization using some secret protocol that will never work with a competing e-mail client program. Yep Microsoft is leading again. Leading it’s customers by the rings installed in their noses. And many of the customers will willingly follow.