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Microsoft Will Try Out Blog Service In Japan
theodp writes "Signaling its growing awareness of blogging as both a potential threat and a new business opportunity, Microsoft is turning to Japan to launch its first blog service and aims to have 1 million users in the first year. Not surprisingly, Microsoft's offering targets mobile bloggers, since nearly 90 percent of Japan's cell phones have Internet capability."
Microsoft just wants to get its fingers into every pie that it can. Today it's blogging. Tomorrow it'll be a search engine. Next week it'll be jacket-powered palmtops or some such crap.
(I get the feeling that the most popular screen colour for these Japanese blogs will be blue, for some reason.)
www.kitchengeek.com -- Nosh for
Okay, I'll confess ignorance. I have two questions about this new Microsoft service.
1) How is a Blog Service any different from Slashdot journals?
2) Why would people pay money to Microsoft to post comments and short, misspelled paragraphs about their lives?
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)
I would argue that it's not necessarily because they are more receptive to technology, but more likely because the barrier to entry is lower. It's less expensive and more practical to deploy cutting-edge and sometimes risky technologies in population-dense areas like Japan and Europe than in the sprawling suburbia that is the United States. Once that infrastructure is in place, it then becomes that much easier to provide new services over that infrastructure. Any mobile blogging service would be doomed to fail in the US right now because of the relatively low number of users with mobile internet access and the still fewer who actually use it for something more than the occasional instant message.