The Red Couch: Bob Wyman on Microsoft and the future of blogging.

Marc Orchant, the editor of Shel Israel and Robert Scoble’s book on business blogging, The Red Couch comments on Bob (forrmerly of of Microsoft, currently the founder of PubSub) Wyman’s post regarding Microsoft’s entry into blogging and aggregation. He’s also asked for responses.

While I certainly sympathize with Bob’s concerns, I don’t think that they are completely warranted. Call me crazy, but I see the blogging community to be much more passionate about their tools than most communities of it size and I don’t think Microsoft is going to run roughshod over these relatively sophisticated users.

One of Bob’s biggest concerns is that once Microsoft makes a free-ware entry into a space it pushes the smaller companies out of the market. But in the aggregator scene that doesn’t follow. There are many already available free tools for RSS aggregation, all competing for share in a small-ish (compared to total computer users) market. As that market grows (i.e. more computer users also become RSS users), as FireFox continues to gain market share against IE (which I think it will, even accounting for IE 7), as Linux desktops become easier to use and more widely available, Microsoft will have an impact on the market for these tools, certainly, but it won’t have the hold on this market that it does in other areas. Bloglines and NewsGator Online in the web-space; FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and Firefox’s Live Bookmarks in the desktop space are all providing widely used aggregation applications. Feedster has one, even though it’s not their main focus. Many others seem to be aiming for niche markets (feedtagger.com, NewsIsFree are examples). Are any of these going to go away with Microsoft’s entre? I doubt Bloglines is. NetNewsWire is, as I understand it, the premiere Mac aggregator - think IE is going to impact that significantly? The niche tools will keep their niches regardless of Microsoft. My point is that the tools are already widely diversified, and Microsoft’s entrance is fairly late in the game. If anything,Microsoft will perhaps have to listen even more to their potential user-base to even get a foothold in the market, given that so many other tools already exist.

As far as blogging tools are concerned, Microsoft is, once again, late to the table. Blogger, Movable Type (/TypePad/LiveJournal), WordPress, and Blogware all have standing in the market and MSN Spaces isn’t a killer app to their users. To many users (myself included) it’s not even competitive. I think the growth of this market now isn’t going to be in new blogging tools from any vendor, but I do see the potential for substantial growth in the hosted MovableType or WordPress area. As more and more people blog, more and more of them are going to want rich toolsets that offer them so much more than MSNSpaces or Blogger do. They’re going to turn to their ISP to offer them a pre-configured blog installation that they can just start posting on. I think it’s already started.

The one place that blogging tools might grow is in just the area that Shel and Robert are concerned with: business blogging. I think as more companies cotton on to the idea of having a (some?) blog(s), there’s going to be a market for tools that make blogging comfortable for the corporate IT and Marketing departments. That’s not to say that MovableType isn’t sufficient for that purpose, but there’s going to be room for more tools of that type, and WordPress suffers from the same problem in this area that much other Open Source Software does in the enterprize - the lack of one throat to choke. These corporations are also going to need some advice on how to deal with blogging in their own unique corporate cultures. This is one place where I think that Bob’s right - Robert and Shel’s book will have a lifespan, but not necessarily for the reasons that Bob mentions; not because Microsoft is going to make the blog-tools world more static, but because Shel and Robert’s book seems to be much more about the process of blogging in the corporate world than about the tools with which to do so.

Once you add all of this up, and factor in Microsoft’s newly-found user-centricity (which Bob seems to forget), and I think you have a situation where Microsoft is unlikely to hurt the aggregation/blogging arena, and may substantially help it.

Anyway, my 2 cents….

other links

Scripting News: 3/16/2005
Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger
Read/Write Web: RSS Reader Market Share

Edit: Forgot Blogware, so I added it and linked up the blogging tools providers