Pittsburgh sample maestro Wise Blood has been generating quite a bit of buzz over the last year, and based on the single “B.I.G. E.G.O.” I am beginning to see what its all about. The track was released last year off of the artist’s debut EP and, like all of his work, it is entirely contructed of samples of other artist’s music, while Wise Blood (Chris Laufman) sings over the orchestrations. Might be gimmicky, sure, but its one I haven’t quite soured on yet.
— Jon Behm
Wise Blood – B.I.G. E.G.O.
Wise Blood: Site
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MICROSOFT (www.microsoft.com).(Product Announcement)
Soft-Letter December 31, 1999 Predictably, the press and analyst community jumped all over Microsoft’s Nov. 9 announcement of Microsoft Office Online, a subscription version of Office 2000 that runs remotely over a Windows Terminal Server connection. Zona Research’s reaction was typically hyperbolic: “When the world’s largest software company announces that the world’s leading personal productivity suite is available through the world’s most significant access method, a major inflection point has occurred.” Microsoft has also lined up an impressive collection of ASP partners, resellers, and OEMs who plan to develop future collections of services based on Office Online. Microsoft Office vice president Steve Sinofsky pointed out that most of these partner offerings will consist of “software and services delivered together,” rather than Office rented by itself. go to site microsoft office online
Marketing tactics: Partnering relationships are clearly Microsoft’s preference for delivering Office Online. One of the few partners with more than a vaporware service is Personable.com (www.personable.com), which advertises Office Online access for “as little as $9.95 a month.” Personable’s subscriptions come with two dozen free games and utilities, but there are significant extra charges for “access fees,” “hard drive storage,” and “computer resource usage” that will bump the true monthly rate for Office Online above $50 a month for most users:
Development issues: Microsoft has invested a good deal of development effort into making Office a Web content-creation application, but Office 2000 remains a “fat client” application that still requires serious bandwidth to run remotely. (Microsoft recommends “DSL connectivity or faster,” but PC Weeks Labs says performance is “painful” even over a T-3 link.) In fact, Microsoft customers have been running Office 97 remotely over corporate networks and intranets for the past several years; the new Office Online offering, Microsoft admits, “simply extends this option to the Internet.” Forecast: Microsoft’s top brass has been careful to avoid predicting how the ASP model will impact the company’s core Office business– though both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have recently insisted that subscription licensing and remote hosting are high on the company’s priority list. web site microsoft office online
Steve Sinofsky, Office vice president, Microsoft, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Wash. 98052; 425-882-8080.
