Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

In another of my recent articles, I mentioned that Microsoft is missing out of the search market bigtime. This week, CIO magazine published an article talking about Microsoft’s plans for Web 2.0 and how they are not that far behind.

It talks about how using distributed computing and managing Web 2.0 services will divide IT managers time and efforts over multiple services and cause more headaches than it will solve. To quote from the article:

“[CIOs] feel like cost and complexity weigh them down,” says Ballmer. “I want to make sure we’re eliminating that cost and complexity and letting them focus on taking advantage of new innovations and things that can add value to the company.”

Steve Ballmer? Selling less cost and complexity? When has Microsoft ever sold anything less than overly complicated? True, it’s easy to hop on the Microsoft bashing train, but they have less than a stellar record for ease of use and costs that are too high for the average consumer. This is especially true in a distributed Web 2.0 world, where I can download Ubuntu, OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird and have a home office up and running in little time and no cost.

So what exactly is Microsoft not doing in the Web 2.0 world? Well for one thing, they are asleep at the wheel in terms of development. Yahoo and Google are busy buying up start ups left and right like Flickr (Y), Writely (G), iRows (G), etc. etc. and building their online office suite overnight with distributed development that is light on its feet and easy to upgrade, instead of huge sluggish development cycles like the Big M. Microsoft did launch Office Live earlier this year, but that requires a Live account and for the user to have purchased Microsoft Office. Well let me run right out and drop $149 on something that I will only use at most 50% of the features, when Google and Yahoo are providing free online utilities to do exactly what I need.

But if Microsoft is working on all cylinders, you can expect to see full integration of web and desktop in Windows Vista, where a user can create a document on their home PC, save it online, and edit it later from work or another computer all with no limited hassle. This can already be done with Google’s apps and several other online office suites, such as Zoho. We’ll just have to wait and see if Redmond is so clever.