Microsoft 'Live Events' targets Evite, others
Microsoft is launching a Web-based service for organizing events and remembering them afterward - trying to move further into the highly competitive areas of social networking and online photo sharing. — The free Windows Live Events service …
Context & Ripple Effects
Windows Live Events lands mid-way through Microsoft's push to rebuild its consumer web presence around hosted services: the company framed that shift in June 2007 with its renewed focus on software plus services, and has been seeding the suite piece by piece, including the Windows Live Photo Gallery beta earlier this year.
The event-planning category itself is not new territory for Redmond's ambitions — the Windows Live brand has been expanding since 2005, when coverage of Microsoft livening up Web 2.0 marked its entry into consumer web services. What is new here is the target: a direct shot at Evite and the online photo-sharing crowd, with a free product. The story drew same-day pickups from TechCrunch and Webware, so it traveled well beyond the Seattle tech press.
First-order effects
- Evite faces a free competitor backed by Microsoft's distribution — every Windows Live user is a potential invitee list — forcing it to defend on features rather than price.
- Microsoft folds event organization into the Windows Live suite alongside photo sharing, giving users one place to plan an event and share the pictures afterward.
Second-order effects
- Rival invitation and photo-sharing services must decide whether to match the free bundling or differentiate on depth, since Microsoft can subsidize the category from other revenue.
- The move pressures the broader social-networking field, where event features are a cheap way for platforms to increase engagement and lock in users' social graphs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large software vendors keep absorbing single-purpose web utilities into free suites, squeezing standalone services whose entire product is one feature of someone else's platform.
- Consumer web competition shifts from who builds the best single tool to who owns the surrounding ecosystem of identity, contacts, and storage — an advantage incumbents like Microsoft are positioned to exploit.
The trend: Portal-era incumbents are reassembling standalone web utilities into free integrated suites, turning feature categories like event planning into ecosystem battlegrounds.