Well, Google did it by buying Urchin, which of course means Microsoft has to take a crack at providing free web analytics.

Aside from the sheer ego factors, MS must have realized the amount of free competitive intelligence Google is gaining by offering Google Analytics. I doubt anyone is surprised to see this happen, but based on their browser war issues, lack of success in the search engine space, I also doubt anyone has high expectations for this.

On the other hand, processing data and generating reports is something that Microsoft desktop and server applications have been doing for years. So, this is a bit more “up their alley” than many of the other things they’ve tried in the past.

We’ll do our job and check it out as soon as we get the invite and give you our opinions.