Olympics Event = Software Platform Strategy

Ok so ive been living in a cave and have not been following on the Olympics (the only most watched event!) until I came across that Abhinav Bindra had won the first Gold Medal for India. Searching for the Olympics event lead me to nbcolympics.com and after watching some of the event videos the geek in me sprung back into life and I was wondering how they build their content publishing solution ?

Only after digging a little deeper then did it come clear that it wasn’t only China preparing to host the Olympics, Microsoft had been steadily preparing as well. If you’re a platform company like Microsoft you would use every possible (global)event to showcase your platform. After some more investigation, found that Microsoft had really planned for the event from multiple fronts to showcase their platform:

• Silverlight - All the Olympics video are based on Silverlight. Its been a while that Silverlight had been released and with Silverlight 2.0 Microsoft had really pushed the envelop in the RIA space. However, the basic challenge was for MS to get people to install the Silverlight runtime. So far Silverlight has only a fraction of the install base as Adobes Flash. Microsoft is using the Olympics event as a means to drive Silverlight adoption, and by the looks of it its working well.
  
• Search - Microsofts Live.com likely isnt your favorite search engine, but when it comes to enterprise solution Microsoft Search Server and MOSS have been making steady progress, not surprisingly MS had used MOSS to power search. As per the case study , Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games had evaluated Googles Search Appliance (GSA) but decided to move with SharePoint possibly after evaluating some of the challenges they could potentially face with GSA.
  
• MSN - MS is trying to woo people into installing the new MSN toolbar by focusing on Olympics content
  
• Others - MS is using Xbox and Zune to publish Olympic content as well
  

So whats the big deal you ask?

Its an awesome strategy! Microsoft is using a global event like the Olympics to:

1. Increase platform adoption (read Silverlight)
2. Demonstrate viability of current technologies
3. Gain mind share
   

IMHO I think it’s a brilliant strategy and also demonstrates Microsofts capabilities outside the enterprise. Other than Adobe, MS is the only other vendor that has a complete vision in its stack to deliver a broad spectrum of end user experiences and was able to demonstrate it.

But does Microsoft get everything right? Hardly, interestingly the video on the homepage is driven by Flash. Theres always room for improvement :)