March 7th, 2006

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Technology
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Is the Tech World Underwhelmed by Live Clipboard?

Today at eTech, Ray
Ozzie, Microsoft CTO, premiered Live Clipboard, a means of extending your desktop
clipboard to the web using structured XML data. Ray talks
about it on his blog, Dave
Winer wades in and Scoble
mentioned it. I went looking for other reactions–particularly critical
ones–and I found precious little analysis or commentary.

Slashdot? Nothing. Digg? Nothing much. Technorati? All of six entries. TechCrunch mentioned it, but there’s way more discussion about, say, some stealth-mode social networking site named Streakr.

In the mainstream media, there are currently only 15 articles filed on Live Clipboard. That’s fewer than some goofy piece about hacking Macs or Google’s new super database. The story isn’t even on the front page of Google News’s Tech and Science section.

What gives? Why is Ozzie proposal being met with deafening silence? I felt
sure I’d find clamouring hoards of anti-Microsoft screeds, but there isn’t much
of anything. From a PR perspective, that’s the worst sin of all. It’s better
to be hated than not talked about.

I wanted some reaction because I watched the
screencasts (warning: mouth-breather on the mike) and wasn’t sure what to
think. I see the advantages of moving structured data or data streams around
the web, and between my PC and the web. The implementation looks gracefully
simple yet kind of goofy. Is this really the way to bring web services to the
masses?

Comments: 6 Responses so far

gillian
March 7th, 2006
9:05 pm

I think we’re underwhelmed whenever someone says XML.

[Reply]

davoid
March 7th, 2006
9:33 pm

I’m whelmed. It looks pretty useful. But i agree with your ‘goofy’ comment. It might take a while before the UI is more refined.

[Reply]

Michael
March 8th, 2006
5:10 am

Easy on having to support every point with a link. We believe you!

[Reply]

Trevin
March 8th, 2006
9:31 am

I agree with your shock that Ray’s keynote and “live clipboard” haven’t received more coverage than it has. But it’s definitely not immediately as sexy as an announcement of the Apple iPod boombox :)

The concept presented by Ray is extremely simple to understand, but will have huge implications for soem really, really rich scenarios. I can’t wait until we start seeing some great e2e stuff ship with this. I woudl love to be able to “copy and paste” an hCal from a webpage (eg. evite) right into Outlook.

[Reply]

Todd
March 8th, 2006
10:27 pm

I think the lack of excitement from the techie web is the lack of excitement in the actual announcement. Why do I want my clipboard on the web again? How does Microsot expect to get anyone excited, I mean actually engaged with this kind of minutia? This might have been interesting four years ago to geeks, but even geeks have moved on from technical parlour tricks and have started to talk more and more about software in terms of its benefits. (Unless you mention ruby on rails at which point everyone has to talk about ruby on rails).

Have my contacts and calendars on a website? I can understand the value in that. Share music? I can get excited about that. Video in my pocket? Cool, I can’t wait to show my friends. Put the contents of my clipboard on a website? Wow get me an RSS feed for that.

The bottom line is that Microsoft has not done one interesting thing for years. Shake something up. Shake one thing up, and I will again believe that Microsoft matters. They’re a huge force in the market, but only as ballast, not as the sails.

[Reply]

Bill Burcham
March 24th, 2006
5:30 am

We’re digging it over on lesscode.org http://lesscode.org/2006/03/22/ray-ozzie-got-the-memo/

[Reply]

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