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After months spent mastering the basics, though, the service is starting to move independently of its parent--MSN--and to carve out its own identity. In recent months, Microsoft has taken the beta tag off Windows Live Hotmail, added the Windows Live Photo Gallery and SkyDrive services, and completed mobile versions of Live Search and other services.
"I really feel great about where we are with the product and the release, but also overall with the online services business," said Chris Jones, corporate vice president for Windows Live. "I think that there is obviously more for us to do and more opportunity, but that's what makes it fun."
In an interview, Jones talked about how things are going with the effort. He also discussed where he thinks Windows Live fits into the social-networking world, considered the company's struggles in search, and gave praise to the iPhone.
Q: Microsoft first talked about Windows Live back in 2005. At the time, Microsoft had Hotmail, Spaces, and MSN Messenger as its three main services. Those are still the big three for the company. How much has really changed?
Jones: I think what you're seeing is really the delivery of the vision that we talked about a couple of years ago, where with Windows Live our goal is to build a service that helps you get to the information you care about, and communicate and share with the people you care about, and really on the devices that you care about.
We've delivered a rich set of Windows client software that lets you connect to those services, and we've delivered software on your mobile phone, particularly on Windows Mobile, but also browser-based ways on your mobile phone to get to those services.
Then the other thing we've done is we've evolved the services. With Spaces you can now go beyond just blogging to sharing your photos and sharing your files and sharing events. With Mail we've gone beyond just the standard HTML view to AJAX and rich mail, rich calendaring, really improved contacts, and then synchronization across your devices.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked earlier this year about being ready to have a conversation later this year with developers about some of those things. Is that still going to happen this year?
Jones: I think some of those conversations have been happening, and I think that that's one where you'll just continue to see us evolve and make progress. A good example of that is the contact interchange work that we just did with Bebo, where you can use the Windows Live platform and that platform capability to connect between the Bebo social network and the Windows Live network.
What kinds of new services would you like to see under the Windows Live banner?
Jones: I think that what we're really focused on is actually making the experiences easier and more seamless for people. Let's take something like photos. People have a lot of photos in their digital camera, but fewer of those people take their photos to their PC, and still fewer of those people share them on a Web site; they mostly e-mail them around.
So, what you should expect us to do is just continue to make it easier for people to take their memories and share them with others.
We did a great job, I think, with photos in this release of Windows Live. I think movies would be a natural thing for us to think about doing, make it easy for people to create and share their personal movies with other folks.
Another good example would be really thinking about calendar sharing, where today we have a great calendaring service, but the ability for you to actually share that, have a shared calendar with a set of people that you care about, that's possible today, but it's quite hard, and it's a problem that we could actually solve for people.
The last thing I'll say is I think that what you've seen us do in this release of Windows Live is really have an approach where we allow you to bring the services you care about into the experience, or publish out to those services. So, in this release we publish to Flickr and we publish to Windows Live Spaces from the Photo Gallery. You might imagine that there will be other photo sites that people are interested in publishing to, and those are the kinds of capabilities we'll look at.
That kind of dovetails into one of the other things I was going to ask. Where is it important for Windows Live to plug into Internet services from other companies?
Jones: I think you'll see us, at least in Windows Live, focus on helping customers in two areas. One is getting your information from anywhere, and that means that regardless of the service your information is stored on, we want to help you get to that information.
See more CNET content tagged:
Chris Jones, Microsoft Windows Live, Bebo, mobile phone, MSN
Microsoft user. You will at the very least have problems
accessing some of the Live services. I used to like Hotmail but
after switching over to Mac for my personal computer. I found
out that not only is Safari browser not supported by Microsoft
with Hotmail Live but Firefox is also having problems with the
service. Oh, of course IE 6 and 7 both work perfectly. Imagine
that? Well, Microsoft I think your just pushing people further
away from being Microsoft product user's.
and 2 with no issue with my hotmail either.
Maybe its the classic keyboard input device at fault?
I aslo use my Live/MSN on my celll service with no issues. *shrug*
Which is a higher number, users of MS Dead or people whose favorite sandwich is liverwurst and sardines? That's a tough one.
Or are you just making this stuff up as you go along? Because it's not working.
Now, IMHO, the big mistake that Microsoft has done is brand everything Windows Live. MSN Messenger is a very strong brand. In fact for many people 'MSN' has become a verb for IM, like google is for search!
I think the Microsoft people are completely out of their minds for trashing this brand.
They clearly don't know what they are doing: there is no point in branding internet services with "Windows", it sounds backwards to consumers.
It's not selling any more windows, which is already dominant, and doesn't need to be pushed anymore. These guys don't understand brands, they seem to be naming things around their internal corporate structure. You don't trash something that you have built and that's already been burned in consumer's mind.
Microsoft has proven to me by 15 years of actions that they are sincerely not interested in making services universally available through superior offerings but hook-and-hold cross-sales of complimentery products.
Oh, you want to use Windows Live? Better be using IE 7. Want to use IE 7, well.. your going to have to be running XP/Vista, or we have a nice windows phone XXX that you'll love! It's sure to work with that services. etc etc.
The reality of it is I think people are just tired of being sucked into services that in many cases are superior to competitors, only to be forced to use other products that are vastly inferior as a side effect.
Because I have been caught in this trap many times, I've resorted to trusting providers such as google for my online services (Gmail, photos, etc) and only resort to Microsoft services for things that are absolutely critical or there are zero alternatives, despite the technical merit of the product Microsoft has.
I imagine it will take a while for Microsoft to rebuild trust with many people before services such as Live take off like a wild-fire, in the same manner that Google's services have attracted people in droves.
And Google isn't that better of an alternative. Google's notorious for using private data to help adSense advertisers, and some people wouldn't feel safe that advertisers have a big eye watching them.
And Microsoft is still working on a lot of their Live stuff. Some of them aren't even good enough to move on, while some are. It's a work in progress, and until they finish, then would they start moving up.
I don't know what all this talk about cross browser/platform is all about... My wife (as novice a user as you are likely to find) uses Hotmail on her MacBook almost daily and seems to do just fine. Can someone cite a specific example? Not saying you're wrong, but what I've seen works, but I have not seen much other than image search and Hotmail.
Video Search is also pretty neat. On most video thumbnails, you can hover over them, and a preview plays, right in the results.
You can also favorite them if you have a Live ID. And Video Search doesn't just look at YouTube, but practically ALL video sites.
And their web search is getting as good as Google's as well. They beefed up their index, and they're also putting the same extended links Google has had for awhile. And the Instant Answers they have is also a plus to me.
Isn't competition great? I love alternatives.
You can see the OE roots in Live Mail, but it is a new product. I have been using this in various beta forms for about 6 months and it is now my exclusive POP mail client. The junk mail controls are superb! The Photo mail is very cool (similar to that in Outlook 2007 but not as bloated).
The downside is that I believe you need MS Desktop Search installed for the near instantaneous photo and mail indexing. I'm not 100% sure on this requirement since I was switching back and forth between Google and MS Search anyway. If you really prefer Google or Yahoo search over MS, then you will need to decide if running these new Live apps is worth jumping ship. To me, I saw no real difference between Google and MS, so there was no decision to be made -- I'll stick with MS Search to run these two other products. I think running multiple indexers would be dumb.
There is a difference.
Microsoft is evil.
Live Search isn't slow. I don't see how. I've used Live Search and Google Search side-by-side, and both find queries in less than a second. How's that slow?
And the links I click, not surprisingly, go to a web page.
So either you're making this up, or you're an idiot. Maybe both.
Dave
- Try Video search too. It's also pretty neat.
- by quikboy2 January 2, 2008 11:25 PM PST
- I have to agree. Image Search rocks.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(22 Comments)Video Search is also pretty neat. On most video thumbnails, you can hover over them, and a preview plays, right in the results.
You can also favorite them if you have a Live ID. And Video Search doesn't just look at YouTube, but practically ALL video sites.
And their web search is getting as good as Google's as well. They beefed up their index, and they're also putting the same extended links Google has had for awhile. And the Instant Answers they have is also a plus to me.
Isn't competition great? I love alternatives.