Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Two wise men on MS, Yahoo and Google

pkbehera: does yahoo use LCS now?
BJ: they seem to have married with "msn msgr" ...if you mean it is LCS...then yes
pkbehera: well MSN is LCS
BJ: I believe LCS is lot more than MSN messenger
BJ: messenger is a front end to LCS
pkbehera: perhaps they have opened up some web services like stuff on LCS for YM to talk to
BJ: IMHO lcs is a middleware + backend
BJ: perfect
pkbehera: right
BJ: btw web services are "default" mechanism for IPC in .NET
pkbehera: well yahoo tried best to enter enterprised and did not have much success, so LCS is one route of getting into enterprises for them
BJ: possible...
BJ: the main magnet for both MS and Yahoo is the following
BJ: 1. Large existing user base for yim
BJ: 2. large existing users for msn IM
BJ: take union of 1+2 ...and get even 10% to click on the ad links...a potential million $ mkt for them
BJ: and many orgs already using yim unofficially for their multi-site collaboration
BJ: now both yahoo + ms want to exploit that potential too
BJ: btw...did u notice unprovoked apperance of ads in latest YIM tool?
pkbehera: yes
pkbehera: thats irritating
BJ: yeah...call it "ad sense" in yim
pkbehera: and keeps shouting at me "u fool, swith to ggle talk"
pkbehera:
BJ: yeah...but all ur peers too need to move to ggle talk then...i see that happening very slowly
pkbehera: which much less lightweight, less fancy
BJ: these IMs are a sticky tool...my father and your father if they are used to yahoo...will not switch to ggle talk easily
pkbehera: thankfully that adsense is limited to the main ym window
BJ: next version will be those popping on and off as u type
pkbehera: yes
BJ: i have a feeling that ggle wants to come out with a whole suite of tools for "collaboration on the web" and go to big enterprises and reduce their bills on MS Office licenses ...
pkbehera: yeah thats their plan
pkbehera: ggle docs is already very impressive
pkbehera: there is few other such players too
BJ: and all these nuts and bolts like gmail, talk, picasa, calendar etc...are pre launch feelers to get the mind share of peple on the web
pkbehera: yes
BJ: yeah...ggle is acquiring small players in the arena ...
pkbehera: with gmail they introduced a whole new concept of conversations, rather than messages and folders
pkbehera: thats getting hugely popular
pkbehera: www.thinkfree.com, seen this?
pkbehera: and www.zoho.com
pkbehera: they give a little more than ggle docs as of now,
pkbehera: MS office has got serious competition
BJ: yeah...billy has already set his best drivers to steer them home with "windows live" adventure