Microsoft Stream Is a New Video Service For Businesses (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader shares a TechCrunch report: Microsoft today launched Stream, a new business video service that aims to give businesses that want to share video internally the same kind of tools and flexibility that YouTube offers to consumers -- but with the added benefits of the security tools enterprises expect from their document management services. The service is now available as a free preview. As James Phillips, Microsoft's corporate VP of its Business Intelligence Products Group, told me, all it takes to get started with Stream is an email address. The user experience in Stream does take its cues from consumer services like Vimeo and YouTube, and includes a number of social features, including likes and comments, as well as recommendations. "We've all been trained as consumers to understand what beautiful and fully featured software looks like," Phillips told me. "And we are now delivering on those experiences in business software." Some of the basic use cases for using video in a company include training and employee communications.

Comments

Monday morning quarterback

[lucm]

Microsoft already had a version of Unix at the time: Xenix, first designed for minis and licensed to OEMs (not customers). But it needed a lot of customization for every new architecture, and when they made the deal with IBM to license them an o/s they didn't have time to create a new Xenix flavor that ran well on x86. (A problem similar to the one Linus Torvalds solved more than a decade later).

So they bought DOS and figured that they would make it closer to Xenix in a later version. But other events occured, and they finally abandoned Unix and sold Xenix to one of the greatest companies in the history of software: SCO.

If you have any experience in IT you know that this kind of short term compromise to close a sale or meet a deadline is typical. In this case it just happens to be a famous one, and since Microsoft has been profitable every year since then (30+ years ago) I wouldn't qualify that as a mistake.