rob was here.

a friend pointed out a new microsoft site to me the other day, found at www.live.com.. Essentially it's a conglomoration-information type page that bundles webmail, rss feeds of different sorts, news subscriptions, and whatever else into one handy website. Theres nothing absolutely new about these things, yahoo! and google have similar ones operational for some time now.

The wierd thing i noticed when visiting the site is that things didn't render properly in mozilla firefox and theres a big title at the top stating, ahem:

Firefox Users
Firefox support is coming soon. Please be patient :-)

What the heck? A smiley.... from microsoft? And whats this about supporting firefox.. the last i heard from microsoft regarding firefox was that it was "supposedly" less secure than IE, and that firefox's features were not relevent to users... Why the switch to favour the competition?

Microsoft.. that's awfully..... google-ish of you.

Yep, Microsoft is hopping on the "cater to the users" bandwagon that Google is pioneeering.. That is, giving people what people want instead of giving people whatever your engineers and software developers produce (and then having the engineers and developers EXPLAIN why it's what people want, to the people)...

The technolgies themselves arn't inherently new.. and I hate debates and articles which try to figure out which company "invented" a specific thing. Who's the first on the block to create a certain thing is much less relevant than who can do it right, by improving on whats all ready there. Indeed, most web and user based technology is more about improvement rather than constant invention.

This gets us back to the topic, conglomoration. In the wake of www.live.com, google has revamped their personalized-homepage by spreading outside america.. That's right, you can personize your google homepage to now show Canadian content such as weather in your city, movies showing in your surrounding area, and the like. Good old Google, always moving forward. Check out www.google.ca/ig if you're in Canada, and try it out for a while as your homepage. It's really nifty.