As part of its three-pronged quest for worldwide Internet domination – via MSN, Live Search, and Windows Live – Microsoft has unleashed a bundled download of its installed desktop Live software: Mail, Photo Gallery, Writer, and OneCare Family Safety. Also included is a slightly redesigned version 8.5 of Messenger, which intimately ties in with the rest of the suite; for example, starting up when you run Mail.
I know they’re not the same types of applications, but to me this just smells of a Google copy cat.
Google ain’t the only one with web applications, you know. They’re all copying each other, including the inherent suckage of web applications.
Except Google is the only one that has such a large group of applications tied together so. How badly they integrate them is probably up for argument
.
So you don’t like web apps, get over it.
It isn’t the fact that they’re implementing what Google has, but the fact it is ‘me too’ – sure, create something like Google, but make it better, have more features, more applications etc. etc.
All I see is ‘me too’ – if ‘me too’ is all they can dig up, people aren’t going to move. There has to be something compelling to the end user or otherwise there is nothing there to justify the pain involved with migrating.
All I see is ‘me too’ – if ‘me too’ is all they can dig up, people aren’t going to move. There has to be something compelling to the end user or otherwise there is nothing there to justify the pain involved with migrating.
I agree with most of your comments, but you’ve seen what? An article? Have you actually tried the software? Probably not.
Are you guys suggesting that Google was the first to bundle applications together? Companies have bundled applications prior to Google. Microsoft was doing it long before Google, does Microsoft Office ring a bell? It’s an assortment of Office applications and you can choose which ones to install. The real copy cat is Google just like most of their other products and services.
So, just value added junk to cheer up MS domestic customers or lock-inware to try and keep them tied to MS products and services indefinitely?
I suppose they need to counter the threat posed by things like the google download bundles, afterall, if all of your customers’ favourite apps and services are either crossplatform or web based and standards compliant then they’re far too free to move to another platform, dangerous.
Not trolling, honest.
By now, most of the Google “applications” run better on Windows than on any other OS, included the web based ones, so I don’t see the danger you talk in a short term. Obviously, this could change if Google coded equally efficient software for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows (and some other ones I am surely forgetting).
Anyway I agree to a previous poster in not liking too much web applications, whatever that means …
So, just value added junk to cheer up MS domestic customers or lock-inware to try and keep them tied to MS products and services indefinitely?
Did you bother to read that the software works with non-Microsoft services (ie. LiveJournal). So much for lock-in.
This is going to be fun to watch.
Should Google give a bit more attention to GTalk?
Don’t judge software you haven’t tried. Windows Live Writer is the best blog editor there is. I’ve been using it since the first beta version which was already very stable and cool. With each new version they’ve added awesome features. And it’s a nice showcase of .NET technology.
I haven’t tried it either, but I’m unlikely to, .Net isn’t part of my platform.
However, I do use a stable, and cool multi-platform blog editor, ScribeFire (a Firefox extension).
Seems a pity Live Writer uses the IE engine, it’s just asking for people to output poor HTML.
(Weird that you’re telling us not to judge it, are you hoping people install it with your good arguments for?)
Edited 2007-11-07 12:45
Maybe you should have taken his advice and tried it before you said anything. It doesnt use the IE engine. It actually makes good html:
http://jcheng.wordpress.com/2007/09/05/writer-now-supports-xhtml-em…
And you might want to read what people say about it after they actually use it:
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=windows+live+writer
And did you not read my post? Firstly, I can’t run it, it will not work on my platform. I read their website about it, I looked at screenshots too, I didn’t waste my time finding opinions on blogs though.
It requires IE, because that’s exactly what it says on the requirements page.
If you read that page, it can make XHTML, but thats on another code path, one which you must choose if you so use it. Anyhow, that’s besides the point. You can write poor XHTML as easily as HTML, its just that one has to be well-formed XML.
I’d love to try it – the problem is Microsoft doesn’t understand Net applications; Net applications are meant to be platform agnostic – by then deliering them solely in .NET and failing to provide .NET on atleast MacOS X, they’re saying to me, “I don’t want you to use our services”.
And to think that I’m actually happy to use Microsoft services if they offered them; I assume they quite happy to lock out a decent number of users out of their ‘ecosystem’ courtesy of their management’s ego.
.Net isn’t meant to be cross platform, it just could easily be made cross platform due to the whole VM/IL thing.
I think the big problem is that .net is the number one reason to develop on windows, and when you have the best dev environment, you get the most developers, which means the most software, which means the most businesses, etc. If there was MS supported .net on other platforms (mono is and always will be behind the times.), it would take away incentive to develop for MS.
It would be nice if Microsoft invested time and money to develop mono – that would help their services side quite a lot; I can’t understand the attraction to Microsoft services.
Their search engine is slow, buggy and come back with poor results; their email services is bloated, and as for their messaging, the only reason I use it because the majority of the people I converse with use MSN. If it weren’t for the huge penetration which Microsoft has by virtue of MSN Messenger, I wouldn’t have any contact with their services.
“Just say no” to both Microsoft & Google (and anyone else with web apps). You want office applications you can use anywhere? Try portable apps on a flash drive. G-mail is useful for web storage if your flash drive starts getting full.
The problem with that is a lot of public places won’t allow you to insert the flash drive.
So, the four components are Mail, Photo Gallery, Writer, and OneCare Family Safety?
Mail: Pointless; POP e-mail is dead, web e-mail is where we go now.
Photo Gallery: Superior alternative exists in basic Windows install.
Writer: Pointless; blogs have their own form.
OneCare Family Safety: Either you’re the kind of parent that tells kids how to deal with bad people, or you’re the kind that lets them find out about things the hard way. Censoring software helps with neither.
“Mail: Pointless; POP e-mail is dead, web e-mail is where we go now.”
See, I kinda like pop (well, pops or imap/tls) being that I have all my email stored locally to read and reply to weather I’m connected to an ISP or working on a stand-alone.
Me thinks your rumours of POP’s death are premature.
4. In using the service, you may not:
use the service in a way that harms us or our affiliates, resellers, distributors, and/or vendors (collectively, the “Microsoft parties”), or any customer of a Microsoft party;
so I may not “harm” microsoft, their buddies, the downstream vendors, or the customers of any of them.
without any definition what they mean by “harm”, that’s a no-go.
See: http://help.live.com/help.aspx?project=tou&mkt=en-us
o I may not “harm” microsoft, their buddies, the downstream vendors, or the customers of any of them.
They don’t want you writing smear pieces with their live services apparently. lol.
without any definition what they mean by “harm”, that’s a no-go.
Why? Is that the only way that you can use the product, by conjuring harm to Microsoft? Sheez, talk about lame.
What do I know what microsoft considers “harm” (without any explanation) done to them, their partners, their vendors or their customers.
This pretty much means “don’t harm anyone – oh, and we don’t tell you what ‘harm’ actually means”
Is writing mails to a ReactOS mailing list with Windows Live Mail “doing harm” to microsoft?
Is chatting about my new PC design I want to sell in Windows Live Messenger “doing harm” to dell (vendor of microsoft)?
As I said: without a definition of what “harm” means, that’s a no-go
As I said: without a definition of what “harm” means, that’s a no-go
Given that you can’t point to a single example of that actually occurring on any of Microsoft’s sites, you’re full of crap.
I already pointed out http://help.live.com/help.aspx?project=tou&mkt=en-us which, after all reads “Microsoft Service Agreement” at the top of the page (and live.com definitely looks like a microsoft service)
then, take a look for “harm” there, and see how vague they are about it
This is so funny because it says that in order to access your new @live.com address from Outlook using POP3 you have to get a “plus” subscription, however there’s no link anywhere to even find out how much it costs. Not even going to your account settings, or anywhere else. So lame. The web interface for the mail is really cool, though.
Really? I thought the absolute opposite. I’ve had a hotmail account since they first started, long before microsoft bought them, and I have been dragged through every one of microsofts forced “upgrades”. They always seem to make the email come up slower and respond worse. The only reason I keep the address is because its free and I’ve had the thing for nearly 10 years now. I will say that the spam filters have gotten better, but the automatic mail sorting is a joke.
its just another example of MS trying to lock people into using their software, vista is bad enough without adding this garbage into the mix.
I’m glad it’s a download and not YET bundled with the OS – that means I can and will choose not to have it!