Jeremy — who recently dropped the “c” in his name — Wright thinks the thrill is gone for Microsoft. So what does Wright think is wrong with the big M?

Microsoft simply isn’t thrilling me anymore. They used to. I’ll still happily defend Microsoft when the time is right, will evangelize dozens of products to the right people and so forth. But it’s less joyful, and slightly more forced, than it used to be. So, c’mon Microsoft, thrill me again. I’ll be one of your best evangelists forever if you just give me a reason to be! Being at this week’s Search Champs would have been a great way to start that process, but it’s by no means the last.

Don’t feel bad about not being invited to Search Champs, Jeremy. I am in Microsoft’s backyard and wasn’t invited either. If there was some special form or secret handshake somewhere then that info passed me by as well.

I’m also platform agnostic, and maybe that annoys some of the camp in Redmond who want people to sing the M$ body electric. If M$ does something that sucks I’m not going to pull punches, so if that costs me invites to events like Search Champs, well then guess it does. Same goes for Apple or Linux; they certainly aren’t protected from criticism. The converse is that if I like something from any of these companies I’m going to praise it to the world — free advertising.

Jeremy, Microsoft’s stock isn’t all that thrilling at the moment either. When comparing the two stocks recently, I bought Apple instead of Microsoft. The first day after my purchase (as if a message from the M$ gods), Apple stock dropped, but it is rebounding now. Apple is just trending better over the last five years than Microsoft. For those more details on this decision, see this prior post: I’m buying Apple instead of Microsoft stock

Microsoft will get a shot in the arm next month when they tell us more about Xbox 2. Let’s just hope that part of that conversation involves a release date in 2005. Also, IE 7 is going to help stop at least some of the bleeding in the browser market although I’ve heard from someone who has seen it that so far IE 7 isn’t going to be a Firefox killer.

Meanwhile, MSN Spaces will keep signing up people who aren’t bloggers to blog and yet not getting any real significant accolades or juice from the ’sphere. That’s the big problem with catering primarily to people who don’t blog with a blogging tool: you won’t get other people regularly blogging using different tools reading and/or linking to these blogs as much. Too bad, because I’m sure there are many MSN Spaces gems that will primarily only see promotion within MSN Spaces.

And where does MSN search end up? My prediction is the advice they received will be only marginally useful. If they had asked me to attend the event and asked for my opinion I could have listed at least 10 things that they could do to MSN search that would help it improve and be more competitive with Yahoo — who is their closest competiton — and ultimately Google, which is the 900 pound gorilla.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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