Outlook Web Access and ... Hello Kitty?

Anybody who knows me or a member of my editorial team can’t escape hearing how much we suffer as unwilling users of Lotus Notes. In particular, Lotus Web Mail is so painful that a lot of us have given up in disgust and simply avoid it. So you can imagine that I felt particularly grumpy about Lotus when I received a press release yesterday informing me that Outlook Web Access (OWA) is celebrating its tenth year “as a catalyst for Microsoft’s Web evolution since its inception.”

            While it’s interesting to consider OWA as a pioneer in software as a service (SaaS) and as having “spawned new technologies like AJAX,” I could only feel victimized by Lotus, the technology that arguably spawned Outlook. But then I started thinking about why Microsoft would send out a press release touting OWA as the product that “paved the way for Microsoft’s software plus services model” and why the company would use OWA’s tenth anniversary as the impetus for talking about this. I wondered what Microsoft was really trying to accomplish with this odd celebration. When I got to the end of the press release and saw a bullet point about Hello Kitty, I wondered if somebody had slipped something more sinister than caffeine into my coffee this morning.

            Is it just me, or does this announcement seem kind of defensive on Microsoft’s part? I feel like Microsoft was looking for a way to tell the world that they are not behind Google in understanding the value of Web applications. They seem to be saying, “Hey! We’ve been doing Web apps for 10 years! We’re not behind our competition!”

Whatever.

Congratulations on 10 Years of OWA

My job is to be objective about Microsoft’s products, and OWA is a product that I’ve used successfully and painlessly in the past (and look forward to using again soon, when my company’s new IT department finishes migrating us to Exchange and Outlook 2007). My experience with OWA stands in contrast to experience with Lotus Web Mail, which I’ve seen as most unpleasant and unproductive. If I see something to celebrate, it’s the quality of Microsoft’s product in contrast to competing offerings.

            Anyway, here’s Microsoft’s list of “significant milestones in the evolution of OWA, particularly as it has paved the way for Microsoft’s software plus services model.” (Don’t ask me how Hello Kitty fits into that paving operation!)