Microsoft does have a bad business model in sense of evolving technology and been consistent with features and upgrade, unlike Google, and thus the fate of Google might be different.

Google doesnt only wake up after its competitors are doing something better, they are always accomodating to change and always improving to satisfy their user base. And this way Google differenciates itself and hence all their projects have the likelihood of securing a very promising patronage.

Well you may say Microsoft had introduced Ajax, but the reality is, the web community is benefitting more that Microsoft. They might be good at introducing a technology, but they are not good at making use of their technology or even going into the extent of making it a worthwhile impacting technology to the web community as a whole.

I only ask because I’ve been playing with the varios Beta Live offerings and they seem pretty good on the whole – some early glitches but then again Gmail etc where not smooth sailing from the word go either.

I’ve had a couple of clients who are quite interested in the possibilities of where MS are going with this – something like a managed hosted MS Exchange / Sharepoint / IIS solution would be really good and while you can go elsewhere won’t another player pushing the boundries of the interface help?

Oh, and let’s not forget… the Ajax-hype surrounding Web2.0 and Gmail etc owes an awful lot to the work MS did to make OWA a really slick tool for Exchange users. Sure some of it was ActiveX but an awful lot was async javascripted XML calls….