Microsoft's Sidewalk stumble boston.com
Heck, I just couldn't resist the intro on this article for our local new media guru. On a subject that he's touted as a big win for Microsoft, no less.
John F. Kennedy once famously said of the CIA: ''Your successes are unheralded, your failures are trumpeted.'' With Microsoft Corp., it's just the opposite. Twenty times a day, we hear how Microsoft's plan for world domination is approaching fruition. Yet, happily for those of us mired in the ''old'' media, Microsoft makes some big goofs.
Hey, but they'll all be fixed in NT5! You're dead meat guy, along with the rest of us Microskeptics.
Last month, Microsoft laid off between 30 and 40 Sidewalkers in cities where it currently operates. This being Microsoft - the CIA analogy is not entirely fortuitous - the retrenching is being called ... an expansion. Sidewalk boss Matt Kursh told ZDNet news that he planned to quintuple the number of city sites in 1998, which he called ''a major, major commitment to the business.'' Like one of its competitors, America Online's Digital City, Sidewalk sites will become more generic, and less ''local'' in content.
How bad is Sidewalk? Let's be fair; it's not as bad as unanesthetized gum surgery, or perhaps the bubonic plague. It's roughly comparable with Digital City (boston.digitalcity.com) and Citysearch (citysearch.com). Of course, neither holds a candle to the Globe's boston.com site, where this column generates 300,000 hits daily. [:)] Bill Bass, an analyst at Cambridge-based Forrester Research believes Microsoft has lost $40 million on Sidewalk, so far. ''It's been a disaster and it will continue to be a disaster until they shut it down,'' he says. ''It irritates them when I say that, but it's true.''
I don't know. Microsoft seems to bring out the mean streak in people. It couldn't be because they're sort of mean, could it? Of course, that $40 million is chump change, old Joachim Kempin can just turn the screws a little harder on an OEM or 2 next time around to make it up.
Cheers, Dan. |
