Link: Microsoft hurt by poor Live branding, analysts say
"Microsoft’s Live branding has been tremendously confusing and has hurt the company, and it is very likely contributing to the situation they are in right now," said David Smith, an analyst at Gartner. "They’ve created another brand and have not differentiated it."
I made the call on this back in December 2005, when I was still at Yahoo! and people were sure that Microsoft’s entry into the ad-driven hosted services space was going to matter. (Remember those days? Good times.)
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Brands need architects just like software. They just have too many people working on all their brands right now.
Same thing is happening to Sharepoint only they aren’t going up against a Google, only a bunch of scared ECM vendors.