Spot the dinosaur

Don’t you just love that illustration? I think it says so much. It’s from an article in The Economist about Microsoft and the new threat from emerging Web 2.0 products.I mean, who wants to use the calendar in Outlook, when Google Calendar was just released. In fact, who wants to use Outlook at all, with an online alternative such as GMail? And as for writing documents I, for one, prefer Writely over Word.

Microsoft must feel this wave of free online software competing with their main products – and I think they are trying to keep up. They are doing something with Live, although I’m not quite sure what they’re aiming at. And they recently released Hotmail’s brand new outlookish, webtwoish style. But can the dinosaur compete? With teams such as Flickr, doing incremental development and releasing a new version of their product every week? Microsoft’s product cycles are measured in .. hmm, years? It takes a long time to turn around a dinosaur. So, which marketing genious decided to make commercials that “show office workers as dinosaurs, stuck in a bygone era.”, as Economist so aptly put it? Anyway, just wanted to show you the illustration, that was all :). Happy easter!