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.

Bing, MSN, and Windows Live share the same origin, which is to say, they all came from The Microsoft Network. MSN came about as a name because it used to be an ISP, though that’s in the distant online past. Later, MSN transformed into a general online content and services platform, with MSN Messenger, the MSN launch page, MSN Search, et al. finding themselves all a part of one platform.

Windows Live found its way into existence after being toyed around as “start.com” (which you’ll now notice redirects to Bing) and later coming into existence as just plain “Live” before becoming Windows Live down the road. While MSN was designed to deliver predefined content much like Yahoo’s default portal, the idea behind Live was to deliver a personalized services experience, from a customizable launch page to various user services such as Messenger. The justification for the Windows Live branding was that Windows Live as a platform was an extension of the Windows experience.

Bing was officially launched June 3, 2009. Before Bing, Microsoft’s search efforts started under MSN before progressing to Live, Windows Live, and then back to Live again in the form of “Live Search". The name itself was chosen because the guys with Kumo (the testing name for Bing) “needed a brand that was as fresh and new as [their] approach. It needed to be like the product — optimized for the Internet.” In other words, it’s yet another web 2.0 name, though thankfully, I seem to have at least been somewhat wrong about the name being a major problem.

So, the end result of this is a jumbled series of online platforms which accomplish only marginally different tasks. MSN is a generic online launch page, while Bing is Microsoft’s version of the plain search page. The customizable launch page concept is now kinda-sorta over at home.live.com, while any further-personal services and extra Windows apps from Microsoft have been tucked under the Windows Live brand name. I can see the logic, but unless Microsoft’s goal is to make some properties look like they’re from Microsoft while making others look as distant as possible while still retaining some association, this sort of fractured online presence just feels much more confusing than it needs to be.

Do you see Google squaring fundamentally similar yet differently functional apps away under vastly different names? GMail (Google Mal), Google Shopping, Google News, iGoogle, Google Google Google Google Great you get the idea. They’re all people-services, and as a result, they all share the same root name. There was a time when Google was slightly branding-confuzzled (froogle), but they’ve rightfully straightened out.

The reason for why I’m busy throwing gray matter at the wall this morning, though, is that there’s just no reason for the Windows brand to fall victim to the same fate. Once upon a time, Windows meant something. The name was directly related to the concept behind the user interface itself, and this has held steadfastly true (the exception being Windows Live, but Windows Live was meant as a tie-in for Windows users) up until Mobile World Congress this year.

Windows Phone 7 is exactly the kind of gradual brandicide that Microsoft really doesn’t need to be committing, whether it’s against Windows or against Zune. I’m inclined to see it as being the eventual downfall of the term “Windows” as a meaningful Microsoft brand for one simple reason:

Do you see any windows in the UI?

Nope. Neither do I. In fact, I see a data-centric user interface in Windows Phone 7, whereas the entire user experience in Windows (including Windows Mobile) up until now has been function/application-centric. With a UI which is so fundamentally different from the original concept of the brand itself, what’s the point of even calling it “Windows”-anything at all? There are no windows, there is no traditional window-oriented multitasking, and the entire UI is many miles away from the Windows concept. In fact, I can explain exactly where this name came from in a few simple points:

• 7 has proven to be worth something in the consumer’s mind thanks to the success of Windows 7.
• Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7 sound similar
• A name close to Windows Mobile was needed so that people could associate it with its completely unrelated cousin without reminding people of the horrors of the old Windows Mobile platform, hence why it’s now Windows Phone.

That’s it. Microsoft essentially decided to take the cheap road and draw heavily from other successful brands despite simultaneously butchering the inherent meaning in the most important name in Microsoft’s history. Whether this was or wasn’t the conscious reason is beside the point; this is absolutely why the name was chosen.

Seriously, do you see any windows in that UI?

Speculation that Microsoft would release a Zune phone, in my opinion, was 100% correct. The only difference is that Microsoft decided to stay away from the Zune name in order to ensure its short-term success. The Windows Phone 7 UI is brilliant in execution, but the problem is that both the name and the UI concept are a huge risk. If Windows Phone 7’s roll-out doesn’t go as planned, if apps stay limited (Zune HD is a great example), or if  Microsoft flubs something up down the line beyond Windows Phone 7 (think Windows Phone 8), more than just that brand will be compromised. Furthermore, if Microsoft proves yet again to know what its doing with its mobile division upon the release of Windows Phone 8, 9, etc., then the brand will further dilute.

Microsoft needs to sort its branding priorities. In the online sector, I can understand the split between Windows Live and Bing, but I see no reason for MSN to be separate from either platform. It’s so closely related to both Windows Live and Bing that it can go under either as another subordinate property. On the flip side, keeping branding separate between Microsoft’s mobile and desktop properties would almost definitely be a better idea: Zune HD is a fantastic device which suffers from terrible advertising, while Windows Phone 7 is definitely not a Windows Phone at all. Zune Phone or Zune Mobile would almost definitely have been better names for the OS itself given the interface similarities (heck, just call it Zune OS. It’s not as if people don’t already know that Zune is a Microsoft mobile property anyway). Microsoft has the backing to make sure the Zune name becomes successful, but Microsoft’s marketing teams feel so compelled to keep some of their brands unnecessarily interwoven in order to ensure short-term success that they’re doing damage to the very foundation of the brands in question.

While Microsoft’s mobile product development teams did indeed have the guts to try something new and go metro, Microsoft’s mobile marketing teams seem to be unwilling to take risks (conversely, Microsoft’s online branding teams seem to be taking too many).

In short, name your similar apples apples and your similar oranges oranges, but don’t name your apples and oranges peaches.

Did I get it wrong? Drop me a line in the comments and I’ll either address your thoughts, edit accordingly, or both.

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.

It would appear from looking at the information provided there that MSN is running on IIS 6.0 and that page was built with ASP.NET 1.1. Both of those relate to “2003″ versions of Microsoft systems – IIS 6.0 included with Windows Server 2003. ASP.NET was launched at the same time. That means that it appears that MSN.com – the number 6 site on the web according to Alexa – is running on software that’s now quite outdated. It seems very odd that they would be running such an important site on software that old, especially considering that the MSN landing page has been updated, in rather significant ways, many times since 2003!

But wait, there’s more

Seeing that site was running on old server software, I decided to see what was up with other Microsoft sites. Rather than mess around with telnet (remember, I’m a child of the GUI – DOS is something I only rarely interacted with in my early computing years), I decided to use the extention Firebug for Mozilla Firefox to extract all the juicy information I wanted from my headers.

Just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, I stopped by Bink.nu since they advertise that they themselves are running IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET 3.5 (correlating to Windows Server 2008). Sure enough, Bink is running IIS 7.0. It reports that the ASP.NET version is only 2.0, but I’m willing to say that’s just an error in that header it’s because .net 3.5 is just .net 2.0 with WinFX bits bolted on. [Props to Benjamin for the reminder. ~Bryant]

LiveSide reported the same bites of information as Bink.nu, which makes sense once you consider that their back-ends are very similar (both sites are powered by Community Server).

I then decided to check other Microsoft sites. First up, Microsoft.com – the company’s homepage. Again, Firebug reported the ASP.NET version was version 2.0. The real shocker, though, was in the server line. It is reported that Microsoft.com is running on IIS 7.5. This version of Microsoft’s web server is to be included in Windows 7 (Home Premium and above) and Windows Server 2008 R2. That’s right, software that hasn’t been released yet. That is quite a leap of faith to be running your whole corporate main site on prerelease software. It’s also quite a difference from what MSN reports. The servers for “Windows.com” will also report the same information. Update: Microsoft did clarify the move to IIS 7.5 in Early February. You can read this here. ~Bryant

MSDN reports that it is running IIS 7.0, which is a bit more reasonable and also the least surprising. Truthfully, it’s what I expected to see running everywhere here in April 2009. Finally, Live Search refused to give up it’s server info, just informing me that it was powered by ASP.NET (no surprises there).

What can we see from these seemingly random version numbers? We can see just how complex Microsoft’s web servers are. They range from the nearly outdated (especially for a company that develops web server software) to the bleeding-edge software that isn’t even released yet and many things in between. At the very least, this gives an insight both into the different requirements for the many pages at Microsoft as well as the different practices between different teams of developers. One would probably bounce between at least five or six different web server versions (major versions, not minor revisions like the 2.2.11 of Apache) each day in your daily web travels. As long as it serves up your pages and isn’t riddled with more holes than swiss cheese… that’s the main idea isn’t it?

In case you’re interested…

Apple.com runs on Apache as well: version 2.2.8. Mac OS X Server 10.5 says that it includes Apache 2.2, so it would be a pretty solid guess to say that Apple.com is powered by an Xserve.