I’d say microsites and blogs serve different parts of what you have to do to be successful:
A blog is your home base in the Social Media word, and the more you can talk about your customers the better.
A microsite on some aspect of Windows will get attention and respect if executed well. There’s some interplay between the two, but if I had to pick, I’d put my effort into the one you can do best for now, then add in the other.

excellent article indeed!
What we’re trying to do is having a content rich blog, as Jason Coehen (http://blog.asmartbear.com/) or Peldi (http://balsamiq.com/blog) something that is related to the product but mostly is related to the people behind it and their experience and know-how.

The main difference as far as I can see it is that our blog is gonna have eterogeneous content and therefore more loose SEO… one thing I’m also not sure about is how google can index old articles. That’s what we have today: http://tabbles-dev.blogspot.com/

How compatible do you think is our approach to the microsite one? Would an extra microsite help or should we focus on our blog (which btw doesn’t even have a pagerank yet…).

thanks,
Andrea

The key reason/benefit of a microsite is to build your reputation as an authority in the field, in a clearly non advertising way. Let’s say my company sold add-ins for Photoshop. By creating a microsite on say simple ways to fix specific image problems in PS, you establish that you know a great deal about PS, are already giving prospective customers something of value, and perhaps starting conversations with them that by and by will lead to your product.

Advertising authority in the online world.

Product microsites are a huge step – backward – the tombstone static web sites of the last century. Now a page that pulls together ongoing information from a variety of sources about your product might be useful – but not as a separate site, but as your product’s main page.

So from what I understand you are talking about creating micro-sites with generic (but useful) content (not related to the product of the ISV) and as it builds traffic to put ads and references to the main ISV site. Correct? Then how is this better than buying ads/reviews on already high ranking relevant sites?

And as a secondary question, what about product oriented microsites? I mean building a microsite to present a single product (includes all marketing and sales content). Does it make sense?