Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

Note the global nature of the service–14 languages–and then consider
the potential impact of the obvious next step:  cross-language
blog translation and links..Hello noosphere!

I don’t expect the other blog platforms to remain far behind..the
competitive dynamic will bring multi-language features sooner than
would have happened without this stimulus, and will help make blogs
accessible to people across the whole world..

Spaces.msn. com will rapidly become an important platform for the global second superpower of wired citizen activists..

The global introduction of Spaces.msn.com, by the way, is a classic
“business ecosystem” play–when a particular market/landscape is
already highly populated by competitors, find a way to spread your
seeds and seedlings across other landscapes that are less densely
settled..

In 1996 Bill Gates and I had a discussion about business ecosystems and
business strategy, where he told me a story about Microsoft’s first
foray into spreadsheets, with a product then called Multiplan. 
Multiplan was conceived as a competitor to Lotus 123, with both running
on MS DOS.  But Multiplan failed in the United States, because 123
was already well established, and an entire ecosystem of complementary
products and services has grown up around 123.  Bill said that
after some time, he finally realized there was no market in the US for
anything but a direct clone of 123.  But he also realized that
there was no French language version of 123, and that France was an
open landscape for Multiplan.  So Microsoft initiated a strategy
program to transplant Multiplan to France.  Multiplan become the
dominant spreadsheet in France, with all the network effects that
result from being a standard.  Multiplan’s establishment in France
enabled the product to generate revenues and thrive as a
business.  Because of both the money and the user base, Microsoft
was able to improve and expand the product, foster complementary
applications and services, establish a thriving ecosystem and learn how
to be a steward of the ecosystem.

The Multiplan germ was also continually prepared for eventual
re-introduction into the US market,  where Microsoft put in place
a plan to change the landscape in a way that would disable 123 and
prepare open ground for the successor to Multiplan.  The landscape
altering plan would be the introduction of the Windows operating system
as the new ground of the personal computer lanscape, replacing MS
DOS.  The disabling of 123 was accomplished by signalling to Lotus
and to IBM that Microsoft would support an alternative groundscape,
OS2, and thus luring Lotus into developing its next generation of 123
for the wrong ground.

Of course, the rest is history.  Windows beat OS2, 123 was delayed
in releasing for Windows, and Microsoft Excell, the successor to
Multiplan, spread like kudzu vines across the US market.

Typepad and Blogger, take note.