Microsoft Reader, back from dead
A TechFlash reader who commented on our E-Book Universe chart yesterday pointed out that we didn't include Microsoft Reader. That's the Redmond company's software for reading electronic books, which has been updated over the past few years …
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft Reader occupies a strange spot on TechFlash's E-Book Universe map: so marginal that a reader of the site, not the editors, flagged its omission from the chart. The software — last visibly touched when it was optimized for Origami UMPCs back in July 2007 — turns out to have kept receiving updates all along, despite having been widely considered dead.
That quiet persistence lands in a crowded stretch for Redmond: Windows 7's launch is days away, Office web apps went up earlier this week positioned against Google Apps, and unconfirmed reports have Zune HD units selling out and two 'Pink' slider phones aimed at the iPhone slated for CES in January. Against that backdrop, Reader looks less like a product line than a maintained asset awaiting a strategic verdict.
First-order effects
- For Microsoft, Reader staying alive on maintenance updates keeps it nominally in the consumer e-book conversation at near-zero strategic cost, even though it has slipped so far off the radar that industry chart-makers forget it exists.
- For publications mapping the e-book universe, the correction is a reminder of how quickly legacy e-book software falls off analyst maps once newer offerings absorb the category's attention.
Second-order effects
- Reader's survival sits alongside the imminent Windows 7 launch, the Office web apps push and the rumored Zune HD demand as part of a Microsoft pattern of holding legacy positions open across many fronts rather than formally exiting categories.
- If Redmond ever decides e-books warrant a serious push, two years of uninterrupted Reader updates mean it would enter from an existing codebase rather than a cold start — which is precisely the optionality that keeping a 'dead' product alive buys.
Third-order effects
- As e-book reading consolidates around integrated device-plus-store ecosystems, standalone reader software faces a narrowing set of endings — absorption into a broader platform, licensing, or slow fade into maintenance mode — and which ending awaits Reader is genuinely unresolved as of September 2009.
- If the pattern holds across the industry, product 'deaths' declared by press silence will keep proving premature, forcing analysts to track maintained-but-unmarketed software as potential re-entry points rather than write-offs.
The trend: Consumer e-book software is drifting toward integrated device-and-store ecosystems, leaving legacy standalone readers alive on maintenance budgets while their category gets redrawn around them.