The author of the "Reflecting on Microsoft" blog writes
Why Doesn't Microsoft have a Blogging Tool? Have you ever wondered why Microsoft doesn't produce a blogging tool? To me, it seems a surprising omission. AOL seems to see a commercial opportunity to interest a significant proportion of its subscribers. However, so far as I am aware Microsoft has no plans in this direction. Microsoft already offers Office to students at a discount. Why not offer a blogging tool too? The odd thing ... at least it seems odd to me ... is that Microsoft has many of the parts of a great blogging tool already in place but the parts have not been brought together yet.
Have you ever wondered why Microsoft doesn't produce a blogging tool? To me, it seems a surprising omission.
AOL seems to see a commercial opportunity to interest a significant proportion of its subscribers. However, so far as I am aware Microsoft has no plans in this direction.
Microsoft already offers Office to students at a discount. Why not offer a blogging tool too?
The odd thing ... at least it seems odd to me ... is that Microsoft has many of the parts of a great blogging tool already in place but the parts have not been brought together yet.
To me this has been the most interesting aspect of working at Microsoft. Before I was assimilated I'd hear complaints about lock-in and how people hated the fact that Microsoft was unfairly competing by building software products that competed with offerings from other companies or making products work better together. Since I used to hang out on Slashdot a lot I usually got the "Microsoft is a greedy, evil company that is trying to rule the software world" perspective.
Working in B0rg Cube I've found out that in many cases there is significant customer demand for the actions Microsoft takes that its competitors rail against. Customers do want everything and the kitchen sink to be built into the products they buy so they don't have to buy multiple products or deal with multiple vendors. I suspect the main problem people have with the Microsoft isn't that it tries to satisfy customer needs for more functionality and software that works better together but that in some cases it builds the software itself instead of licensing from others and thus contributing to the software ecosystem. From what I've seen this isn't the general case, in general this extra value is added by Microsoft Partners but in the cases where partners become competitors there are always hard feelings.
Disclaimer: The above comments do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. They are solely my opinion.