Bob Wyman thinks blog tool innovation is marked for death with an apparently serious entry of Microsoft into the space. Toss in Yahoo! getting into the game and you can start to see some serious lockin developing. Then again, the sky was falling when AOL journals was about to come on line too. Wyman is also being a bit parochial in that he's an advocate of structured blogging essentially the embedding of more task specific tools within blog apps. If blog tools go the way of IE development, then he's got a point.
One possible interesting effect of this development is a serious arms race around Web services. If it's still about getting developer mind share as well as users, then being smart about Web services will be a serious strategic advantage, and the field is relatively level here. With big time stakes, we may get an answer to that SOAP v. REST debate real quick. Also, I generally don't bet against MS developers, but buildling scalable, reliable, secure web services is new territory for them. Has MS actually delivered a Web service API that folks regularly build on?
In fact, other than Amazon I don't feel too many crews have actually gotten serious Web services right. Flickr is about as close as I've seen from a small shop, and they're still working out glitches. Google's AdSense might be roughly considered one as well, but concrete positive examples are few and far between.