My MSN

Along the lines fo my last post and Goyer’s recent sell out I’ve been thinking about how Microsoft could very easily end up crushing all it competitors in the next few years. Despite serveral articles (too lazy to find links) about Linux gaining popularity and Apple doing wonderful things with Mac OS X, I forsee that in a couple years with Longhorn and .NET, it will hard for pull both users and developers away from Windows. In light of this I been taking a closer look at Microsoft currently offers in terms of web-based applications. Obviously there’s hotmail, which appears to now includes pretty nice address book and calendar.

I also decided to take a look at My MSN I’m not sure how long it’s been around in it’s current form. The tour says “Welcome to the all-new MSN!” but I can figure out how long it’s been all new, and I don’t know what the old one was like. Anyway, it’s current form looks quite nice. It allows me to select the personalized content that I would like displayed, such as my lastest hotmail email, the forcast for my areas (Akron and Waterloo), the value of my current stocks, the scoreboards for my favorite teams (Raptors, Sixers, Nuggets and Eagles), and movie times from Regal 16 in Lacaster or Famous Players in Kitchener. With the right browser (for me it only worked in MSN Explorer) you can drag and drop the different content modules into different locations on the page. It looks pretty slick. Will it ever work as well in a non-microsoft browser… probably not. Will it still gain widespread use… probably.