Joel Spolsky had a similarly disappointing experience with Windows Live as I did. He calls it the Marimba Phenomenon:

The Marimba Phenomenon is what happens when you spend more on PR and marketing than on development. “Result: everybody checks out your code, and it’s not good yet. These people will be permanently convinced that your code is simple and inadequate, even if you improve it drastically later.”

Hadn’t heard it called that before, but it happens often enough, and the name is great: In the mid 90’s, the company Marimba trumpeted and eventually launched a product called Castanet that was something like a Java-based push platform (this wasn’t long after, or maybe even concurrently to, PointCast — remember them?). To Java types, and many non-Java types (or Java non-types?), Marimba Castanet sounded foundational, revolutionary, indispensable, and had an aura of universal usefulness, with a hip 90’s name to boot. I think the product is still around in a different incarnation. Anyway, the release of Castanet revealed a product that just didn’t live up to the high expectations that had been set. It worked (and probably still works), but it wasn’t foundational, revolutionary, indispensable or universal. So we moved on.

Microsoft has a bit more staying than Marimba, but as long as there’s choice in the Web marketplace, it can’t afford too many launches going off the rails like this.

Windows Live looks like Microsoft’s tardy and half-baked answer to My Yahoo! It’s a customizable portal, with placeholders for weather and news and feed subscriptions etc. According to Bill Gates’ announcement today (video at CNET), Windows and Office are not required to use Windows Live. But try it from Safari on your Mac, and you’ll get just a fraction of the page (only an MSN search box). On Firefox (at least on Mac) you’ll see this:

Firefox support is coming soon. Please be patient

You know, a garage startup can maybe get away with this kind of thing. But this is Microsoft! And the announcement was a major event, not some leak of an internal research project. OK, so it works only in IE, and I guess Windows Live is destined to be the home page for millions of unsuspecting users of the next version of IE. But if Microsoft wants the rest of us to pay attention and if it wants to be taken seriously in its efforts to catch up with the new realities of Web-as-Desktop (call it whatever you want, but don’t call it Web 2.0), then it has to demonstrate that it’s a) adding some value — that’s TBD for Windows Live — and b) not going to make a fool of itself by trying to bring its insidious embrace-and-extend practices to Web content. That would be fun to watch, though. Never a dull moment … [nor a productive one].