Today's big announcement from Microsoft, among some other tidbits, was the demo and public release of a beta of Microsoft Live, which you can of course read Scoble busting a vein about. I would love to say that it's remarkable, but it doesn't seem to be - At first glance it barely differs from the whole Excite @ Home portal concept that hit the floor with a thud 6 years ago. It looks like Excite (@) Home + a greatly scaled down version of Konfabulator in a limited, IE-only, heavyweight shell.

Portals are dead, and if this is the great revolution Microsoft can deliver, then Microsoft truly is in serious trouble. Microsoft has done some amazing things, and they have a lot of amazing people, so when they're doing a supposedly huge strategy shift to take on Google it should be extraordinary. It shouldn't leave you searching around trying to find where the good stuff is hidden. Weak excuses that they "can't show the best stuff yet...you just wait!" rightfully raises the B.S. detectors of most grizzled software development vets (because we've used that lame excuse when we've under-delivered)

Of course, as is standard for these sorts of things, Microsoft is also trying to get the community to create the content via a cheap-labour contest (which Google has been a great exploiter of) - Expend the effort and trouble to add to their somewhat weak launch list of "gadgets" and you too could be entered into a draw to win an XBox 360! Woo! I'm always amazed at how cheap such firms can be about an element of their strategy that is so enormously critical.

Microsoft biggest announcement today was vapour, and "coming soon" betas. What a disaster (it isn't that it's a terrible solution that they've built, but rather that it's just so underwhelming coming from the largest, most powerful software company in the world. Expectations are so much higher, especially given the emphasis put on this strategy). I'll reiterate that 2006 won't be the year for Microsoft (and I'm a Microdroid by some accounts).