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."

Comments

Kinda a flooded market

[rwven]

Does anyone think they're going to have much luck with a program like this in a market that is as flooded as the blog market? There are so many options for blog creation out right now i have a feeling microsoft will be getting a run for it's "money" or worse with a step like this. I can't help but expect failure.

Re:Kinda a flooded market

[Anonymous Coward]

==putting all of your eggs in one shaky basket.

Microsoft's penetrance into the embedded devices market is puny and it is doubtful that shackling other unwanted products to it will help.

New trend

[michaelhood]

I predicted before this would become a new trend. American companies will start launching "high-tech" startups in companies like Japan first, to see how they are received, before trying them on the American market. The general public seems to be more receptive to technology in some European and Asian markets, as evidenced by their wide use of wireless and mobile technologies.

It will be interesting to see how this affects the way we do business.

Orkut

[geek]

They couldn't possibly make one worse than Orkut. Orkut is the slowest most worthless POS I have ever had the displeasure to use. Honestly. The Brazilian issue isn't even a big deal, or it wouldn't be if they provided ways of searching by region/language. As it is when you search for a community you get a list of 13,000 over half of which will be in portugese. You have no options for filtering it. Orkut is unusable during the day, it's literally that slow. It takes several minutes just to login. If google was smart they would drop the "affiliate" part and just cut it loose. The only thing I hate more than Orkut is probably LiveJournal.

If MS does this right I'll use it. It must be fast, foster a good community vibe and be user friendly. Oh yeah and all this "Must be invited to use our dog slow and shitty service" won't be tolerated either. MS is smart though, I doubt they'll be so dumb as to make it invite only.

Re:Orkut

[satoshi1]

Orkut is something of a "friend-meeting" thing, right? Not a blog provider. That'd be -1 Redundant of Google, seeing as how they already own blogger.com. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I see no connection between Orkut and blogging.

Re:Orkut

[British]

I would have thought with Google's backing Orkut would have blown friendster and myspace away in all features. Sadly, it is suffering from the same problems its competitors are.

You're right. It takes forever to login, only to find all 20000 communities one is joined to has no message board activity.

There's no blogging function either. While it may not be used much on myspace or friendster, it's a little nice to have, not unlike the blogging features on slashdot.

Oh, and Orkut is still a sausage fest. kthx.

Re:Mmm.... mobile blogs!!!

[Elwood P Dowd]

According to Wired Magazine, some Japanese kids can type on their mobile faster than they can talk. And Japanese makes as much sense to type on a 10 key keyboard as a 105 key keyboard.

So while we might get that crap in the states, I think it'll work ok in Japan.

Re:Can someone help me understand blogging?

[gl4ss]

uh.. you already wrote it down as a word.. you going to find many expressions that aren't words?

you just read the wrong blogs, some development diaries & etc can have real gems in them. of course a blog about "nothing" is going to be quite boring.