“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefitted from Microsoft working with Flickr,
Windows 7 Home Premium, Facebook,
Office 2007 Enterprise, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.” – Microsoft statement on Google Buzz.
When one of the big guys launches a new product, competitors generally just sit it out and let the press do its thing. But Microsoft made a point of reaching out today with the quote above, criticizing Google Buzz as “another social network” and noting that Hotmail has aggregated Flickr,
Windows 7 Professional, Facebook,
Office 2010 Activation, Twitter and other services since 2008.
Of course Microsoft also owns a chunk of,
Windows 7 Ultimate Key, and has a search deal with, Facebook. So they’re being threatened on a number of fronts. Still, just the fact that Microsoft is speaking on the record about Buzz shows that the guys in Redmond are a little worried. And they are not the only ones.