The reason Microsoft owns you is simple; they're big but they're agile. It isn't just desktop operating systems, it isn't just servers, it isn't just mail, it isn't just SQL, or Office apps or instant messaging or internet servers or any of the several thousand software titles they've created or bought in the last 20 years. They're the company everyone loves to hate, but every once in a while, whatever hate or vitriol you might be collecting has to fall away when confronted with the awesomeness of a simple tool backed by a huge infrastructure.
Behold Task Market. Outsource your simple, one-off jobs to the Internet and sell your spare time and unique talents to the same place! Get paid via Paypal...what else is there? Amazon Mechanical Turk is roughly the same idea, but here the idea is to get serious work for serious money. It's stunning.
Why so? When my wife was attempting to earn extra cash as a stay-at-home mom, I was surprised at how difficult it was to line up gigs doing simple one-off jobs. She'd cruise the day gigs at Craigslist and anyone who's done it will tell you trying to line up a steady source of income with the child care needs of a toddler and no regular babysitting is difficult. In the middle of all that, I was reading about other stay-at-home moms, professionals who took a couple of years off to have a child. They were also suffering from the 1-5 year lag time in their careers; it's hard to get back on this merry-go-round once you've spent a significant amount of time off of it.
I was thinking at the time, 'Wouldn't it be great to have a website where moms could go, get jobs that you could do with your broadband and computer access at home (which is almost anything a business does these days) and get paid?' I toyed with the idea - even came up with a catchy name: mompower.com. Nothing came of it - the more immediate needs of getting cash and personal issues meant that I had yet another back-burner idea that I wouldn't get to for a while, if at all.
Additionally - I owned a small-business IT company for a few years. At the time, I was dreaming of a way to have a stable of IT techs that would bid on available jobs, complete them and get paid - all virtually. No office space, no unnecessary overhead. Again, never got off the ground and for much the same reason: I didn't have the time or commitment to make it happen. The idea about virtualization still stuck with me; businesses that run on making virtualization at some point had to embrace the same type of thinking for themselves.
Well darn it if MS wasn't thinking the same thing. Taskmarket is almost exactly what I was thinking of, but with the wider market space of anyone who has a talent that can be virtually outsourced - most knowledge workers fall under this umbrella. It's stunning. It's like what Ebay did for garage sales. As I told a friend (MR) - this is stunning, this is revolutionary. This is interesting and this is worth watching.
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