Microsoft and Branding: What the heck?

posted on March 16, 2010 by Bryant Zadegan

Up until now, Bryant’s life has been dominated by more scholarly matters. Now that time exists, things should be returning to a manageable pace.

Miscellaneous Microsoft branding

How many different consumer online platforms does Microsoft have right now?

Bing
MSN
Windows Live
XBOX Live
Zune Marketplace

That’s just a quick braindump; there are probably more, but for the purposes of my quick bout with insanity, this should suffice. The way I see it, Microsoft is rapidly losing branding focus, and while this doesn’t sound like something that matters in this age of Web 2.name-it-whatever, it is an issue for Microsoft, and it extends beyond the world of Microsoft’s online properties.

Jump to see why I think this is becoming a problem. Yeah, it’s long, but this is one of the few times when an overly long post is justified.

Tags: Bing, MSN, The Microsoft Network, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Live, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7, Zune, Zune HD

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MSN.com not running Microsoft’s latest and greatest?

posted on April 1, 2009 by Devin

This topic is way too technical and/or boring to be an April Fool’s joke. Sorry. ~Devin

While researching to make sure my computer wouldn’t explode at exactly 12:00AM on Wednesday, I happened to see on that site that to check a server’s time, you can look up HTTP information via telnet (Note: This will only work on computers running Windows XP or below. Windows Vista and Windows 7 do not include telnet by default).

While examining these headers, I happened to see something very interesting with the site I tried: the very popular MSN.com.

Check after the break for an analysis along with other targets.
Read More »

Tags: ASP.NET, IIS, Inconsistently surprising, MSN, servers, Unsurprisingly inconsistent, web, windows server

7 Comments »