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MS To Launch Internet Versions of Office And Windows
daria42 writes "In a press conference this morning, Bill Gates said Microsoft plans to launch Internet-based complements to its core products, dubbed 'Windows Live' and 'Office Live'. Windows Live is a set of Internet-based personal services, such as e-mail, blogging and instant messaging. It will be primarily supported by advertising and be separate from the operating system itself. Office Live will come in both ad-based and subscription versions that augment MS' Office suite. The programs won't replace the paid software but instead seem aimed at diminishing Google's ad revenue. Windows Live already appears to have 'gone live' in a preview format on the web."
Firefox Users :-)
Firefox support is coming soon. Please be patient
. Did I read that right? MS supporting Firefox?
Hmm. Cool.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the reason news of Goo.... Goooo... Ggggg... I can't say the name... but it has nothing to do with them and their work with Open Office.
All I can say is "Microsoft, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE 'bet the farm' on this".
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I have to say, I was more impressed with "Windows Live" when it was called the Google Personalized Homepage.
I'm the stranger...posting to
I hope they don't plan on using ajax or java script to do it. The IE java script interpreter is so damn slow it is like watching paint dry. I just tried to build a large scale app using a java script interface kit and failed. It failed not because the program was bad, as a matter of fact it was damn snappy in firefox. Then I did the unthinkable and loaded it up in IE, slow as mud to the point of being totally unusable. The next person that tells me how great IE is, I am going to punch in the teeth.
Got Code?
Unless they can really trim the fat, this will be the biggest motivation for broadband since pr0n.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
They could have had these products in the works for quite some time, though it seems a safe bet that this is in response to the recent Google rumours. Who cares, though? Reacting to the needs of the market is what smart businesses do. Microsoft seems to be going through a stage of re-inventing themselves somewhat. Becoming leaner and quickly responding to the market is what they need to do to survive. Good on them.
That's what used to be known as a "portal". About 10 years ago, anyone who could slap together a page like that could instantly IPO for a billion dollars. It's hardly something Google invented.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
"This advertising model has emerged as a very important thing," Gates said.
Translation: "We really missed the boat on that one, and are desperately trying to catch up."
"The live phenomenon is not just about Microsoft. It's partners, it's competitors...the whole space is being transformed."
Translation: "I woke up one day and suddenly there was this technology company making alot of money... and to my surprise it wasn't Microsoft! I knew I had to take over that tech sector ASAP so I asked someone what all this 'online' stuff was about."
I really wonder how much they had to pay for live.com. According to whois the domain was just updated on Oct 31.
Google personal homepage showed up waaay after Microsoft experiments in this kind of homepage under http://start.com./ Talk about revisionist history...
Also, is it just me, or does firefox do the same thing IE does there? Tried both, and it looks the same, with just the little Firefox users... banner at the top.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Microsoft is in the position IBM was years ago and they are just beginning to realize the effect of Google and it seems a bit too late now... ...a lot of Microsoft's current offerings aren't all that appealing or innovative compared to Googles and other companies.
This seems like it could be the beginning of everything moving to a more web-oriented computer experience. Who needs Windows when you can use Office, MSN, etc. FROM FIREFOX (under Linux). Windows could be left for professionals who need a robust platform to run "real" applications for things like video/image editing, CAD design, etc. Everyday users could do the most basic computer tasks in the same way under Linux as under Windows... I guess even if this kills Windows, Microsoft has a stake in it either way now...
Windows Live is a painfully bad rip off of Google's Personal Homepage [google.com].
I hope you're kidding. It seems, more and more, that there are the deluded who believe that Google, along with Apple, are responsible for everything.
This is nothing more than a rehash of portals, such that we saw in the late 90s. Excite was one of the biggest and most configurable portals, and of course many of us configured it, setting up our stocks and our weather, and then never used it again.
Developers are leaving Microsoft and going to Google in hopes to make millions like early Microsoft employees did.
It's a bit late for that at Google now: It's too big of a company for that get-rich-quick type nonsense. However it is true that a lot of ex-Microsofters have left to join small startups, or to create one themselves. This is especially true too now that Microsoft is becoming just like every other traditional "where careers go to die" organization.
Also Microsoft is stuck using their own software as a development platform
Nonsense. Microsoft's development platform is extraordinarily powerful, and it certainly isn't a detriment that they use it.
The problem that Microsoft's internet ventures have, and it's always been this way, is that they do the absolute minimum amount possible to ensure that they aren't eviscerated, but no more. If you remember, the IE team smoked Netscape, and then they were promptly disbanded. Why? Because that team and group represented a threat to the Microsoft cash cows - Office and Windows. These "web versions" of Office and Windows are almost laughable - if anything they'll complement, and most certainly they won't replace until Microsoft is on its deathbed and the revenue has completely dried up.
live.com wow, wish i was the one who owned that name. Imagine how much money they payed for it.
$action = empty(PHP) ? backToC() : unset(PHP) ; "when the concrete cases are understood, the abstractions are readily
No. And, I don't think, as I'm sure will be said here, that it has anything at all to do with Google. It has to do with Microsoft wanting to figure out a way to develop an bottomless income stream. For example, many people where quite happy with Windows 95 untill they where forced to upgrade. Many people saw no particular reason to migrate from Windows 2000, untill they where forced. Many companies have built very expensive internal server applications around NT and Windows 2000 Server, but soon, they will be forced to upgrade. Over many of these platforms, people have stuck with Office 95 or Office 2000, because they sill functioned on the platforms and did what the users needed, not reason to upgrade. Microsoft sees revenue here, basically locking users into forced upgrades because once you buy into Subscription Office, you have to keep paying like a junkie if you want to access your documents.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
It was their 2nd choice...
http://evil.com/ was already taken, so they thought laterally!
Make that 3rd, http://vile.com/ is taken too...
Google themselves don't have any plans because they don't have an office suite... but they just invested a ton of money into the open source community... ... and if Microsoft's "live" beta does well... you'll see clones... open source clones, and if it is good enough, Google might do it... (but who knows, "copycatting" doesn't seem to be their style just yet, they've got a lot of creativity left in them)
:)
===
From the POV I think Google is looking from...
It's a lot easier not to look like a bad guy when you are letting other people do your work for you, I think... Google's got a good edge on that... the open source community is large and just needs money to help it along... it'll edge in on Microsoft's turf while being respectful towards Google for helping it originally.
They don't need to branch into these areas because they are basically paying other people to possibly do it for them... putting them in a better position to indirectly influence that part of the market...
It's a good long term strategy... very sneaky
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Your criticism doesn't make any sense. If a beta is a full product, that's good isn't it? If no showstoppers are found you'd expect it to quickly become a release candidate and then soon after that to be released. That sounds like a pretty good use of the beta cycle to me. So in what way has Microsoft not been honest in their use of the term "beta"?
How exactly is Google a tyrant?
All that this says is, "All of these years, the reason that I've hated MS is because they were successful. All of that bitching and moaning was because MS made money. I have never had anything objective to say about Microsoft. It's all been lies."
Seriosuly. What did Google do? All that anyone has accused them of is 1) Stealing all of the talent in software (damn, people want to work there, sounds evil) and 2) Raising the prices of software engineers (shit, and now I make more money).
News flash, the only people who complain about Google are the evil corporate masters that you're also supposedly railing against. Really. If their company was all that good, people would want to work their anyway. Amazon.com is not having any problems hiring talented people. Trust me. I've met some of their people.
What you're saying is that nobody can succeed and not be evil. I disbelieve that. I believe that honest people can make an honest living and still, at the end of the day, be honest. Call me old fashioned like that, but believe it or not, one day I'd like to be successful too. Also, I'd appreciate it if you don't call me a tyrant when I am.
I'm going to bank that they don't hurt Google in the least bit. Google has a customizable portal that I tried using for a while as well. And honestly I ended up back at the original Google page (well truthfully I'm using the suggest version... I love that page).
.02 copper though.
When it comes to searching the web... I don't want a portal and I'm going to assume that most people don't care. Portal services I use Yahoo, but I never use Yahoo for searching I use Google. It's simple and clean which is what i want in a search engine.
Microsoft is likely to hurt Yahoo in the portal arena for me if they can match and surpass what Yahoo currently offers though.
just my
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
I think its real but it is in desperation..
MS Office makes up a large amount of MS's income with the recent resignation of Offices key executive and just a day after google goes public about contributing actual paid employees into open office it does make you wonder...
This whole www.live.com thing looks nice but two things i dont get is a) the slashdot feed is there (linux users haven) and i saw the netscape logo there too b) its all beta beta beta, MS has a reputation of releasing stuff with a little more substance.
Have you even tried using Live.com? Sure, it's superficially like Google's personalized home page, but it does more than that. First off, Live.com is from the Start.com project, which has been around longer than Google's personal page (as others have already pointed out), and thus Google is copying Microsoft. BWAHAHAHA. Ahem. Second, Live.com is more "slick", for lack of a better word. You can change the number of columns (want 2 columns instead of 3? only 1 long column?), and the interface just feels "smoother" than Google's (not sure if it's the colors, fonts, icons, or what, and I'll agree that this is really personal preference).
Third, and probably most importantly, Live.com is much more customizable than Google's page. Sure, you can add or remove certain canned items or create a new "section" from a search or a feed on Google's page. You can do that on Live.com as well. However, you can also write your own "gadgets" to add on to the page that are not just RSS feeds. I'm sure Google has the knowledge and talent to be able to do something like that, but you can't deny that Live.com does things Google Personal doesn't.
As for the name "Windows Live", the Slashdot article title is just completely stupid. This is not an "Internet Version of Windows", but a companion. The "Live" naming obviously comes from Xbox Live, which is not an "Internet Version of Xbox" but a companion service that allows you to communicate and interact in new and interesting ways with your Xbox ("new" and "interesting" as applied to Xbox, as online gaming, voice chat, and friends lists have all obviously been done elsewhere before Xbox Live). "Windows Live" is obviously aiming at that same idea. Whether they get there or not is still yet to be seen, but at least they're trying. That the beginning looks like stuff we've already seen (though to be fair, we did see it from Microsoft before Google) isn't the point. Go to Windows Live Ideas and look at some of the stuff that's coming. Live Mail is just parity, but Windows Live Safety Center looks pretty cool, as does Windows Live Favorites (okay, so it only imports from IE and not Firefox, but a) it is Beta, and b) it is still Microsoft ...). And it sounds like this is just the beginning. Maybe the whole Windows Live thing will fizzle out with nothing more than a neat portal and a modern web mail client, but it could also turn into something really cool.
Back in the day when Microsoft were too stubborn/clueless/scared-shitless of thin-client computing, they did everything they could to kill the whole idea of network computing. They would hear nothing about how software would be delivered to lightweight machines over the network.
When Sun was saying "The Network Is The Computer", Micosoft was busily saying "Network? What Network? There's no network -- Hey, look, Clippy!".
And, now that they're trotting out what is, oh, what, a 10 or 15 year old idea, they're going to spin this and say they've innovated, and look at what they came up with.
The simple fact (IMO) is that Microsoft couldn't innovate the shit into a diaper. They rehash ideas other people have done, make incompatible implementations, and bray really loudly about how they're giving the consumer what they want.
It's only because Google is lining up to completely eat Microsoft's lunch in the area of web-delievered technologies that they're even beginning to look at this market segment. The difference being, Google implements it, releases it (and free SDKs for it), and then moves on to making other stuff. [ Witness an earlier story about a Carmen San Diego-esque game based on Google maps, Google pedometers, and god knows what else I've missed ]
As has been pointed out by smarter people than I, Google is leaving the actual technology in their wake. Microsoft is leaving press-releases and open-ended promises about what they might deliver in the future.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Sorry to bust your balloon but microsoft is fundamentally dedicated to a world where everyone pays a monthly subscription for microsoft products and there are no competitors and any potential competitors are locked out before they can even get started.
Fooled me once, shame on me- fooled me at least 15 to 20 times- well I guess I should assume you are trying to fool me on any future attempts. (convicted of stealing competitors products, well known tendency of breaking competitors products by tweaking the operating system, well known tendency to slow competitors products by tweaking the operating system or using illegal API's and still certifying product, bundling, giving away products for free until the competition is dead then never innovating, "embracing and extending" java, j++, the halloween memoes, "collaborating" on products with a competitor and then bringing out their own version using knowledge they picked up during the collaboration, etc. etc. etc.).
They are not just another large capitalist company. They are something unique and they want to lock that in forever. They bought or drove out of business every legitimate business that competed with them either legally or illegally (Stak/doublespace comes to mind- there are others).
Trust me, you don't know it but you really do want 4 to 5 solid OS's competing with many different products so that they keep each other honest.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Most likely you're thinking about NetDocs, which, though it never shipped as a single product, did actually contribute many pieces to Office (InfoPath in particular), MSN (parts of their billing and support system, Messenger, pieces of MSN Explorer), and other Microsoft products that did ship. Alternatively, you might have seen pieces of Hailstorm, which was later named ".NET My Services" before being killed. Again, much of Hailstorm's knowledge made its way into .NET (Hailstorm was all about Web Services right when the whole .NET thing was starting up, and it's no coincidence that .NET has very robust support for SOAP-based web services).
This is not all that different from what other companies do, with the exception of Microsoft publicizing projects that are eventually killed or integrated into something else. This is not even unusual for Microsoft. For example, where do you think the Office Assistant (Microsoft Agent) stuff came from? Microsoft Bob (especially the dog and cat). While it was patronizing and simplistic, it was also way ahead of its time -- task-based interface, scaleable vector graphics, "interactive" help (say what you will about Clippy and the Office Assistant crap, but many people liked them and you can't really argue with the cuteness factor), etc. This is how companies grow and innovate. What Microsoft learned from Hailstorm surely has a direct effect on Windows Live, just as what they learned from NetDocs affected Office and what they learned from Bob affected Windows and Office. For example, they've learned to use open betas to their advantage, and to incubate fresh ideas with little intervention (Start.com, the origin of Live.com and arguably the cornerstone to the whole project, was developed, shipped, and supported by a team of only two or three developers with no management overhead or other BS, and who were allowed to be open about the process through blogging and customer interaction -- they were even allowed to support Firefox!).
People scoffed at the first couple versions of Internet Explorer, but when Microsoft got fired up they really blew everybody away. Hopefully this time they've learned that follow-through is just as important as shipping, and Windows Live doesn't stagnate the way IE did.
"It's easy. It's live, and it has 'me' at the center of the universe," said Blake Irving, a Microsoft vice president who was on stage to demonstrate Windows Live.
Microsoft has the most obnoxious PR-speak of any corporation on earth. On the other hand, Google or Apple would just tell you what their product does and why you need it, usually in one sentence.
I already said in another post that I want coexistence, not a monopoly on any side.
Unfortunately what you want doesn't matter at all.
What Microsoft wants is to kill all competitors by 'cutting off their oxygen supply'. BTW, every other IT company is seen as a competitor. This is ingrained in the corporate culture, and starts at the very top with Gates/Balmer. That is why no one trusts them, not because they love Linux and hate MS (or whatever), but because they hate the things Microsoft has done and wants to do.