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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."
Just look at what Google is doing today.
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.
...Brog Service in Japan.
I actually quite like it... Slashdot is just pissed off because it used to be a News Site and now everyone is calling it a Blog :-)
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.
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)
A fatal exception 0xFE7 has occurred in blog. The current blog will be terminated.
"dmn. blu scrn o dth!"
He's completely wrong. Every japanese cell phone I've used has each column of the chart on a button..
..
so if you have the chart like
a ka sa ta
i ki shi chi
u ku su tsu
e ke se te
o ko so to
then '2' would be a, press again for i, again for u.. depending on the manufacturer and model, you'd go through hiragana first, then hit katakana. Or, you'd switch modes to get to katakana/hiragana/alpha/numeric inputs.
For the kanji, there's either a special button and it'll interpret, or some phones have a little window at the bottom that has a list of commonly used words that start with what you've typed in so far. This was a really nifty feature on mine that I loved.. saved me a lot of typing for when I was emailing my japanese friends.
And yes, I said email: that's how text messaging works over there. There's in-network (c-mail, skymail, whatever..), but to get between J-Phone, DoCoMo, au, etc.. you use regullar smtp email, built in to the damned phone. Annoying when my parents didn't realize that I was reading their 10 page long emails on a cell screen, but oh well.
I just hope there's not a Japanese equivalent of "I ate a sandwich today. It sucked. I hate my life and my parents because they make me do homework. Linkin Park is the only thing I relate to. " (grammar and spelling have been corrected)
www.google.com
Microsoft does run a site called "The Spoke," at http://www.thespoke.com. I'll admit that I don't know anyone who uses it (and it's badly broken in Firefox), but it's got Blogs and "Copyright Microsoft 2004" at the bottom. So it's not quite fair to say this is their first entry into the world of blogging.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized. -AC