Is Microsoft Catching Up?
I’m writing this post using something called Windows Live Writer. This is one of many new services offered by Microsoft under the new windows live platform.
There’s a nice post here that talks about the services available. But it begs the question of whether Microsoft if catching up on all this web2.0 stuff.
Above is a screen cap of the windows live writer application. At first I was confused in that I had to actually download this application. How weird? Then I thought “how weird that I thought downloading something was weird”. I guess I’m just so used to working with online applications that the concept of having to download an application to make a blog posting seemed foreign to me. But having downloaded it I kinda see where Microsoft is heading.
This represents one of a series of tools that you can plug into other applications or use independently. I must say that I’m actually really impressed with this writer, it has a ‘Save draft offline’ function which is nice, and when I first used it it walked me through a simple wizard where it connected to my blog and found out what sort of blog it was (wordpress in my case) and then actually showed me the editing window using the CSS of my blog. Cool!
There a bunch of ‘insert’ functions to the right that I guess will enable me to add more plugins to the posting, here’s a map as an example:
I guess in general I have seen a few things Microsoft have done recently that show me that they are finally catching on to some of these concepts, it’s a shame that it seems to take so long to get these things up and running however.
More to come on this topic.
UPDATE: You know Microsoft is changing when they build and publish a ‘Blog This’ add in for Firefox.