Microsoft is caught between a rock and a hard place. It does not want to be dependent on a major rival but on the other hand, Overture provides a significant amount of MSN's revenue.
Microsoft is at this juncture where it's the victim of its own success.
Microsoft hasn't done a good job of marketing and needs to improve ? and the timing is crucial,
Microsoft has made more of a demarcation of versions around features and capabilities. If you look at Professional and Home, the major difference was networking. Now with the new line-up there is a fair bit of differentiation around features.
Microsoft has a good story to tell. It doesn't always do a good job telling it.
Microsoft had tremendous success with larger businesses, but that market has become very saturated.
Microsoft didn't say how much source code would be licensed. Contrary to some news reports, I expect the amount of source code to be fairly limited.
Microsoft definitely is making progress. The UI is more refined, but by no means finished. Microsoft has finally reached the point where IE feels like a modern browser.
It's not something I expected from AOL, but it's the right direction at the right time.
What these services do differently is protect the messaging environment.
