I posted on my personal weblog about Windows Live and the threats that it may or may not pose to startups working in the web services market the other day.
It fostered some good discussion in the comments section of that post and also at our annual meeting yesterday.
That discussion, which started on my personal blog, moved to the comments section, and then resulted in a live conversation at our annual meeting is a very good example of what we are trying to do with the Union Square Ventures weblog.
Windows Live and its impact on the web services market is an important topic and we’ve now spent a bunch of time discussing it and thinking about it.
After all of that, I wrote another post on my personal weblog this morning which I will repost in its entirety here. I hope this stimulates even more discussion and learning.
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Thanks to everyone who posted comments and linked to my Will Live Kill post.
It’s always amazing how much you can learn by simply putting your thoughts out there and listening to what comes back.
In this case, the key point for me was that this is Live 1.0 (Windows 1.0 was lame too).
And that over time, Microsoft is going to invest in and improve this service.
So in trying to figure out if Live will kill, the key question is how long it will take Microsoft to make Live compelling?
Yesterday, they did something to make it compelling to Union Square Ventures. Microsoft bought FolderShare, the folder sharing service that we use in our office to keep all of us synched up no matter where were are.
So now there’s at least one thing that I will use at Live.com. That’s a good thing because it will keep me going there and watching how they build this out.
And that move in itself points out a big part of Microsoft’s strategy. If they cannot build compelling services for live.com, they will buy them.
So maybe Live won’t kill web 2.0. Maybe it will line the pockets of some web 2.0 entrepreneurs.
hmm.