News
Windows Live Emerges From Beta
- By The Associated Press
- November 06, 2007
After a trickle of updates and "betas" bearing the Windows Live moniker,
Microsoft Corp. is ready to start promoting its official package of free desktop
programs for e-mail, instant messaging, blogging and sharing photos.
The programs are "essentially a free upgrade for Windows," said Brian
Hall, general manager of Windows Live at Microsoft.
The package includes Windows Live Mail, which can grab messages from multiple
free Web-based e-mail accounts, including Microsoft's Hotmail, Google Inc.'s
Gmail and AOL e-mail. The new package, which Microsoft formally announced Tuesday,
allows PC users to read and respond to mail even when they're not online, just
as Outlook Express, which Microsoft has phased out, did.
Its Windows Live Photo Gallery lets users manipulate and organize digital photos
and upload them to Flickr, a photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo, and to Windows
Live Spaces, Microsoft's own blogging and social networking site.
The package also includes Live Writer, for writing blog posts, the Live Messenger
instant-messaging program and Live Family Safety, parental controls for Web
surfing at home.
The applications aren't much different from test versions previously available.
What's new is the spotlight Microsoft plans to shine on the programs.
Hall said the company has planned "one of the largest online advertising
campaigns at Microsoft," with plans for 10 billion Web ad impressions on
Microsoft's MSN sites and third-party sites, including the social networking
site Facebook, in which Microsoft
bought a 1.6 percent stake last month.
Microsoft's Windows group will be marketing Windows Live alongside its latest
Vista operating system during the crucial holiday shopping season.
Matt Rosoff, an analyst at the independent research group Directions on Microsoft,
said this marketing push is indicative of divisions within Microsoft, between
the old guard running the MSN online business and the Windows Live group.
"Windows Live is about making Windows better by tying it to online services,"
and thus driving more people to buy Windows computers, he said. MSN "is
still the old business model," of generating revenue with Web advertising
based on online applications that don't connect to Microsoft's desktop software.
The world's largest software maker also took steps to make its Web-based services,
like Hotmail, more coherent, and to rein in the number of products and Web sites
it tagged with the "Live" brand.
"We've made big, big steps in this release," Hall said. "But
we still have an opportunity to make it simpler, and we will. We're working
on it."