From Macworld: News: Microsoft's YouTube rival arrives in public beta:

Microsoft has unveiled a public beta of its MSN Soapbox video-upload service, its competitor to Google's popular YouTube service.

There's a huge disconnect here, and I'm going to imagine that it's not on Microsoft's, as they have enough intelligent people employed at Redmond not to make such a large slip-in planning strategies.

In the next four years... YouTube will not be unseated by MSN Tube. The iPod will not be unseated by Zune. MSN will never overtake AOL, at least not while dialup is still arguably relevant (I believe that's almost history rather than a prediction already).

I'd have to guess Microsoft knows they're smart enough to create a knock-off of these technical innovations that they can make far more money off of 5-25% of a market than it'll cost to write and maintain. They've got the talent, why not make something just as good, technically speaking? Innovation? Zilch. Minority stake in the market? Guaranteed.

So what's out of kilter is that MS automatically gets their new item slated as a possible market dominator when something like an iPhone equivalent gets press like this from SciFi.com.

SCI FI Tech | SCIFI.COM:
Well, this [digital device], known as the Meizu M8 PMP, comes to us from China, land of the knockoffs.

The Kia Amanti looks like Jag (the first version even more so), and can leverage that "homage" to grab a slice of the car market. This is happening in each of these cases.

Labels: , ,