The personification of the duality-in-man, Paul Thurrot, takes a look at Windows Live. “In this article, I’ll examine the genesis of Windows Live, and take a look at how Microsoft plans to capitalize on the integration of Windows with various Web-based services and products. Then, I’ll briefly examine each of the Windows Live services that the company plans to ship this year, saving full reviews of each service for their eventual ship dates.”
Yeop, I’ve been getting some of the betas for the live products and they’re quite nice.
Windows Live Homepage – similar to google homepage is basically the same thing. I couldn’t find many functional differences, but the Windows site does common sense stuff ( like offering a CHOICE for celcius
). It also looks cleaner, but overall, not much difference.
Windows Live Messenger – this is a bit of a dissapointment for me. It’s basically the same as MSN Messenger, but too much graphical space is wasted. It’s not a ‘clean’ look as opposed to the Windows Live Homepage.
Windows Live OneCare – I downloaded this and I guess it worked fine, but since I’ve become comfortable with AVG antivirus and my own anti-spyware solutions, I didn’t really see any advantage in this. However, for the average user, I think its a great solution as it automatically updates, doesn’t have many options, and is clean.
It’s definitely looking good I’d say.
Hmm, windows live lists slashdot under Directory->Science&Tech
The thought crossed my mind that you should probably be able to add any site with an rss feed to that section… It just puts it under “My Stuff.” I suppose there may be some way to do it that’s just not terribly evident to me.
I decided to go play with my google home as well. While I think I find live’s interface easier to learn (it’s not a far cry from what you expect a website to do), I’m far more impressed with googles. You can actually click and drag google’s little gadgets around the page, that’s pretty impressive.
You can actually click and drag google’s little gadgets around the page, that’s pretty impressive.
You can do the same with Live’s. Just hover over the header of a gadget, click ang drag it to another part of the page.
>>As a long-time fan of MSN
That’s as far as I got before I threw up in my mouth a little.
Windows Live Mail is one of the most impressive Web-based email clients I’ve yet seen, head and shoulders above Google’s GMail and similar to (but not as attractive as) the Yahoo Mail Beta (Figure) that’s currently in testing.
I personally don’t think so. There was a link on Digg a while back where you could skip the application process and be enrolled in Windows Live Mail Beta. Here were my issues with it (note, some may have been fixed, I switched the interface back to Hotmail so that I could use Getmail and FreePOPs to forward all of my e-mail to my Gmail account).
1) The ads are just plain obnoxious. You’ve got a very small area compared to Gmail to write e-mails and read them. Gmail offers a very large area, and if you hold down shift and hit compose, you can even go full-screen without a single ad to write your emails, much like Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird.
2) Unless they have changed this, you cannot have multiple messages open at once. With Gmail, you can hold down shift and open a bunch of messages, all in seperate Windows. One thing I like with Gmail is that I can hold down shift to compose in a new window, minimize the main Gmail interface, and use the small window so I have more screen real-estate to view other reference materials while typing my email (this really helps on a 15″ monitor). Yahoo! Mail Beta does this also, but using a tabbed interface, which I personally don’t like but I still think many people will like it. I personally think Gmail should also offer a tabbed interface (available in the settings) and Yahoo! should offer a Gmail like approach to this common problem with webmail clients. Last I checked, Windows Live Mail had no comparable feature to either Yahoo! Mail or Gmail.
3) I found Windows Live overall, including Windows Live Mail, to be kind of buggy. Yes, I realize this is a beta product, but last time I tried the Live.com portal for instance, I kept having to re-add many “widgets” that would for some reason disappear on me. Note that two of these widgets were offered by default through the sidebar, and were Windows Live services. One was the Mail preview (much like the Gmail preview on Google’s personalized homepage), which is quite obviously a service/widget provided by Microsoft, not a third party. Some of the problems with WLM include me having to click Send 5 or 6 times to send an email (to get the confirmation), only one of those emails showing up in my sent mail folder, but the recepient receiving every single attempt.
4) I’d like to have some of whatever Paul Thurrot is smoking. Windows Live Mail is just plain awful in Firefox. The WLM team even admits this in a big notice when you log into WLM with Firefox. There were about 50% of the options available in Firefox that were there in IE. Contrast this with Gmail, which works equally well in both IE and Firefox, and relatively well in Opera (didn’t try any other browsers). If you have a very old browser, Gmail offers the Plain HTML view which offers all of the features of regular view, but just more slowly (due to the lack of AJAX support). WLM offers nothing of this sort, you are just stuck with a half working, half baked interface when using Firefox. The only way to avoid this is opt out of the beta and lose the extra storage and stick with Hotmail.
So yeah, these are my main beefs with Windows Live Mail. My only hope is that they:
a) Allow me to keep the Hotmail interface for use with FreePOPs
b) Enable a forwarding feature
c) That the FreePOPs team quickly offers support for WLM if Microsoft shoves it down everyone’s throat and forces them to quit using the Hotmail interface.
To add-on to my issues with WLM, I will also admit some issues with Gmail to show that I am not a biased fanboy.
A) When the Gmail server containing my account is in maintenance and unavailable, they don’t tell me this. Instead, I get a connection problem, and the thing just keeps refreshing and trying to connect.
B) If I use FreePOPs to forward Mail directly to Gmail using my ISP’s outgoing mail server, the email never arrives. Gmail must see that it is coming from a Hotmail address but not a Hotmail server, and just delete the message instead of putting the message in my SPAM folder like Hotmail does. Because of this, I have to forward the email using FreePOPs and Getmail to an ISP email address I have set up, and then have that email account forward the messages to my Gmail account. This works relatively well, and Gmail is still able to detect which messages are SPAM and which aren’t.
C) When a Hotmail server comes down for maintenance, it doesn’t go back up until it is ready. Although this happens less often in my experience with Gmail, when it does, often the server goes back online for a few minutes, then is back down, then up and then down, before returning to stability. I find this extremely annoying. This happened to me today when I was trying to get at emails I needed to view. With Hotmail, I could wait until it was working then phone the guy I was getting the info for. However, with Gmail, we hung up, I checked 10 minutes later, it was working, I saw my inbox, I called the guy back, and then it stopped working again. He wasn’t too impressed that I had bugged him for nothing.
So yeah….all webmail services have areas they can improve in. I can say without a doubt that neither Hotmail nor Gmail is as awful as Netscape Mail. 90% of the time I couldn’t even receive email on that account.
Ya just gota love that duality-in-man personification
Live.com carries on MSs long tradition of calling their alpha releases beta releases. Playing with it off and on over the course of a couple of weeks led to repeated login failures and inappropriate redirects. After signing into live.com I would then have to sign into Mail seperately which would log me out of live.com. It seems like they have a great idea but I wonder about their ability and commitment.
Google Personal is much more refined and in my estimation snappier. (But I do find Google Personal to be an oxymoron as they were the original “anti-portal”.)
If MS can’t do substantially better than they have so far, then google has no worries.
microsoft has taken a very very long time to get its crap together, but with live and vista they seem to understand something that for better or for worse i now treat as a constant – every now and then you must start fresh, rm -rf, clean dir, reformat the drive, whatever.
i don’t know if vista will be buggy, crashy, or whatnot, but visually it looks good and it looks like microsoft will be delivering a killer desktop that will give few people a reason to try an alternative. in any case the real story is that osx, vista, and the linux desktops deliver what their target audiences want and do so without technical issues, so the “desktop battle” is basically over. next is the web battle.
one could say google and yahoo have sealed this up. i don’t think so. yahoo’s site is such a mess at this point that rm -rf is their best option. google rules search but many of their other services are weak, and they deliver nothing really to business users.
vista will solve a lot of problems for ms. live will create lots of problems for yahoo in particular.
>>in any case the real story is that osx, vista, and the linux desktops deliver what their target audiences want and do so without technical issues, so the “desktop battle” is basically over.
Vista most certainly is not delivering what the target audience wants without technical issues, since of course it IS NOT A SHIPPING PRODUCT YET. Moreover, the beta testers say it is incredibly buggy and slow.
You’re doing exactly what Microsoft wants you to do, you’re living in the mythical future where you’ve actually got ahold of that carrot Microsoft has been dangling out in front of you for years. The reality: You don’t have it yet. Users of the other OSes do.
Vista most certainly is not delivering what the target audience wants without technical issues, since of course it IS NOT A SHIPPING PRODUCT YET. Moreover, the beta testers say it is incredibly buggy and slow.
WTF do you expect? That’s why they call it a “beta”.
You’re doing exactly what Microsoft wants you to do, you’re living in the mythical future where you’ve actually got ahold of that carrot Microsoft has been dangling out in front of you for years. The reality: You don’t have it yet. Users of the other OSes do.
LOL. Yeah, like 2% to 3% of users, to be fair.
Microsoft is taking our rights away,
time to move to linux.
So Microsoft is playing in Googles space. Thats good for competetion but in the long run Google will fall by the way side and join the junkyard of companies smoked my Microsoft.