Portals and Browsers

Ok, so I'm just reading Slashdot comments about the new Windows Live launch. What's Windows Live? Apparently it's supposed to be an online version of Office and whatnot. If you go to the site, you're presented with what is, essentially, a portal. It's still in beta, but the idea I think is to make it your one stop web homepage.

Now this all seems familiar somehow, and Slashdot commentators where talking about the bygone days of Excite and all the other web portals-- how they had their weather, stocks, newsfeeds, etc all configured on it and made it their homepage.

When I look at my browser right now, I see weather thanks to ForecastFox, news feeds courtesy of Sage, and even web email notifications with the Yahoo Mail Notifier. So I guess I should call up some VCs and IPO my browser configuration? I think Microsoft may have once again misjudged where things are headed. We don't need web pages to aggregate our information if the tools are already in our hands.

PS. And I didn't even get started about Office! Who is going to want to pay a subscription to use Word? Even Google has balked at that and is propping up OpenOffice instead.