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Memo Outlines Microsoft's Plans
conq wrote to mention a BusinessWeek article that covers some of Microsoft's upcoming web plans. From the article: "Live.com, Microsoft's customizable search-oriented portal, has more than 3 million users and the second-highest Net Promoter score -- a metric showing how many users would recommend the site to others -- of all MSN.com properties, writes Cole. That's good news, since the Live.com portal is the entry point for the first release of its Windows Live Search, the site through which Microsoft hopes to make the big bucks through paid search. Microsoft on Mar. 8 unveiled a slew of features aimed at letting users personalize the way they search the Web."
I wonder how much MS shelled out for that domain name?
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
That article is nothing more than a Microsoft press release. This sort of garbage "informercial" is why blogging is gaining credibility over traditional journalism.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
David Cole, a Microsoft senior vice-president, outlined progress and key objectives for Windows Live in a memo obtained by BusinessWeek Online.
"Memo"? Sounds like some hucksters press release to me. I don't know who Businessweek thinks its is kidding by calling these pronouncements from Redmond anything other than a PR statement.
"And I can assure you the onslaught of upcoming Windows Live services will place us in a strong competitive position and will reestablish our leadership in the industry."
Businessweek and Slashdot pretend that's "news" because...
Anyone want to take a guess?
When I tried live.com (Firefox on Debian) I clicked on the Safety Center widget hoping for some hot tips but got this message instead: "Oops, we seem to be having a problem with this feed. Please try again later.". I then tried their "Live" searchbox at the top of the page but after a minute of staring at a white screen which just said "Loading ..." I gave up. After that I clicked on tabs which said "News" and "Images" but these also produced a entirely blank if quite restful white screen.
Good to see that things worked just as one would expect from MS. Naturally I would unhesitatingly recommend live.com - my small contribution to Micosoft's prodigious "Net Promoter" score. When folks get back to me saying live.com doesn't work, I'll be suggesting they another website and, preferably, try Mac OS or Ubuntu as well.
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Excuse my ignorance, but paid for by whom? Is that why a picture search for "titties" is blocked by live.com? People going to have to pay to get the good stuff?
"Over the next 3-6 months, we'll ship more innovative technology into the marketplace than during our entire 10-year history,"
Live.com might fail, but that statement might turn out to be truer than MSoft will ever care to admit.
objectively thinking ofcourse, there's almost zero chance of live.com not being atleast moderately successful, even with all the news of Google acquiring Writey etc etc
Why does this look so farmiliar?
Raj Against the Machine! http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/
Well competition is good, it will simply drive Google & Yahoo to do better. Much as I love Google, they make choices I think suck sometimes...
e.g. [bmw autohaus finden] in Google.de use to pull up BMWs dealership finder before Google penalized them, BMW were forced to remove the doorway keywords, now it brings up nothing useful. Way to go Google.
Even if its competition from Microsoft, it will be a good thing, as long as MS doesn't try it usual anti-trust crap.
What a load of mumbo-jumbo. They say live.com has over 3 million users. That is a complete lie, who the heck knows about live.com except geeks? Even geeks don't use it!
This is just a PR marketink tactic to make people think that there is already a continuous stream of users visiting the site, and a large (3 mil) stream of users if I might add. This way people would be more inclined to visit the website more often when they know such a large number is visiting the website.
And I can assure you the onslaught of upcoming
I think I'm not alone when my reaction to such crap usually is something like take your assurances to some pr-publishing journals for the masses, we're only interested in professional quality products, and unless Live search site will prove to be ["will" = i.e. I still don't see it as such] a worthy competitor with providing some megnitudes more quality and/or service, I'm not interested.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Live.com doesn't even work for me. I'm trying Firefox 1.5 on Debian, and when I enter a search term, all I get is "Loading..." and nothing else.
Has anyone actually made it work under Firefox on Linux?
Paid "press release" infomercials like this are business as usual for Microsoft. Nothing new in the MS business model except some names, terminology, and so-called "new" technologies. The sense I get from my customers, co-workers, and overall tone of discussions, bolgs and forums, etc. is an incredible lack of excitement in anything Microsoft related. The article left me with a feeling that MS is scrambling to catch up while trying to strike a spark of enthusiasm in a world that is growing more and more skeptical on a daily basis.
That's good news, since the Live.com portal is the entry point for the first release of its Windows Live Search, the site through which Microsoft hopes to make the big bucks through paid search.
This is a joke right?
Live.com (as it appears to me) is just an attempt at copying everything that is popular on the web. A Favorites Section ala del.icio.us (yahoo), Personalized Simple Desktop that the user can Customize (this has been around, but google made it simple) Mail / IM integration (Google/Yahoo feature)
I don't see anything as new except for the "Security Center" which obviously will be some antispyware/malware/virus thing, however I don't necessarily consider MS the authorities on security but more like the person who left the window unlocked in the first place.
The hook for Microsoft is obviously vista. This portal thing is going to communicate directly with every user (Similar to Google Desktop). Vista will also do everything to guide the user into using that site as an extension of the O.S. The new IE will make sure of that. Makes sense that Microsoft Office Online will probably be integrated somehow into this system as well.
I do think that this is a dramatic improvement for MS, and they are catching up quickly; but they don't want to take the lead. They like exactly where they are.
FTFA: One such service is a click-per-call capability that will let users connect to businesses via Web-based calls by clicking on MSN search links. Sources tell BusinessWeek Online that the capability will be unveiled the week of Mar. 13.
Another example of following google's lead.
This really a great example of a Drafting Marketing Strategy. It's been no secret that MS lets others innovate, and quietly absorbs all of their breakthroughs and then corners the market with their massive resources. Firefox being another in a long list of victims from this strategy.
Are they going to make office available as well? Google is already working on their own office live (writely..etc)
"unveiled a slew of features aimed at letting users personalize the way they search the Web"
followed by a slew of new features aimed at letting the NSA snoop on how you search the web.
Even if its competition from Microsoft, it will be a good thing, as long as MS doesn't try it usual anti-trust crap
To try and beat Google, they will use any dirty trick (legal or not too blatantly illegal) they know (and they know a lot), like they've always done. It has more or less always worked, brought them where they are now, so why should they change their methods ?
I know it has already been said a thousand times, so let's make it a thousand and one : in the internal dictionary of this company, competitors = "people who must be bought or killed, in any order appropriate". Of course, this is more or less the general rule of every capitalistic entity. They've just been better at it than others in that department. Delivering safe and stable products is a second priority when you have, through other ways, stifled any serious competition.
Here is the secret to Microsoft's domination:
1.Take a pile of dog crap.
2.Gold plate it.
3. Add more dog crap.
4. Gold plate that.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you have a huge imposing structure.
This results in glittering mass which impresses the avearage person, but underneath it all - it just stinks.
They are obviously following this formula in their challenge to Google.
Have you read a blog, beyond Microsoft fanboys saying how great live.com?
I get recommended all sorts of sites by word-of-mouth from friends, and no-one has even mentioned live.com.
davecb5620@gmail.com
I tried out live.com on WinXP using MSIE 6.0 and on Mac OS X PPC using Firefox 1.5 and Safari 2.02. It failed to load on Safari (all I got was the spinning "loading" cursor), and was clumsy on MSIE and Firefox. The scrollbar is usability disaster. The idea of being able to scale the little piccies in the image search is nice, though.
For a search engine, speed is king. Google did it right with their almost empty page. Yahoo! has lots of stuff on their page, but then, they area portal and not justa search engine. Still, Yahoo! loads faster than live.com.
Unless live.com really gets up to speed, becomes more compatible and loses some of that bloat, I see little chance for success. By the time live.com hits the streets, Google will have improved its own offering substantially, leaving MS in the dust.
Live.com, Microsoft's customizable search-oriented portal, has more than 3 million users and the second-highest Net Promoter score -- a metric showing how many users would recommend the site to others -- of all MSN.com properties
Are these 3 million users all high? Maybe I'm on some phenomenally poorly connected part of the internet, but I haven't even gotten live.com to complete a search successfully. Aside from that, most of the widgets on the main page don't load, and the one image search that worked only had 3 results.
The page looks like crap on Opera (actually, it doesn't work at all as I just noticed), and behaves badly on just about every other browser (haven't tried IE). It loads slowly, and uses crappy non-standard interface elements to boot (that scrollbar! what the heck were they thinking?)
Interesting how this fluffy PR disguised as "news" comes from the same steaming-pile that brought the article (hit-piece) titled "Gauging Googles Gaffes" just yesterday?
Coincidence? Not likely. Disgraceful? Absolutely.
To use any feature on that site requires javascript. This really bugs me, since it makes using w3m, lynx, or firefox with noscript un-usable. Google, at least, makes their sites workable without javascript, even gmail.
I'd never heard of a "Net promoter score", so I asked Google, and it pointed me to another Businessweek article.
The site doesn't work with Safari or Internet Explorer for OS X and is painfully slow and cumbersome in FireFox. I couldn't see any area which was better than Google let alone better.
Does anyone else consider this less a measure of live.com's success and more a measure of how unpopular all the other "MSN.com properties" are?
Sheesh. I fixed it:
May I point out an exception to that "rule"? The SCO Group would love to send a terminator back to remove Pamela Jones before she started groklaw.net
Top Ten signs your court cases are going badly:
10 you have a blog posting every (public) detail of the case
09 This includes all of your FTC filings
08 You have hacked off two judges
07 and they are talking with each other.
06 The guy that cowrote the book on the language says you have no case.
05 The guy you paid says you have no case.
04 The guy from 6 also worked on writing the OS you are talking about.
03 You are fighting IBM. [What about the mood???]
02 You are fighting Novell (and they want to Ebay your offices).
01 Bill's PIPE fairy just went on vacation and you are running out of money.
--
Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. citizens pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?
Microsoft has always had a socially clueless side.
Windows Live Mail, the new version of Microsoft's flagship Hotmail e-mail, is hosting 750,000 users, and the company hopes it will host 20 million by June, according to the memo.
Isn't it reasonable to assume that all this means is that all the Hotmail users will be automatically converted over to Live Mail in June? Doesn't anyone at BusinessWeek have the smarts, or the chutzpah, to ask whether this is even plausible?
Are there any reliable estimates of the number of free mail users out there? 20 million seems to me like an awfully large chunk of the entire market.
No offense, but I work in web development and people like you are a royal PITA :-)
I understand that you may not think javascript is completely necessary, but you're asking for access to interactive applications while at the same time demanding that you not be forced to use an up-to-date application runner. If a site is just about giving you information, then great, don't make javascript a requirement. But stuff like live.com with the gadgets and whatnot is not just about displaying text; it's meant to be an application-style experience. Depending what the page does, it's a huge amount of extra work to make it work scriptless, and only benefits a very small percentage of users.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
What if MS$ manages to dominate interenet search. How long will it take for MS$ to favor only
MS$ based web sites and information and only work well with Vista?What if MS$ manages to dominate Internet search. How long will it take for MS$ to favor only MS$ based web sites and information and only work well with Vista? Not long I suspect.
This kind of control of information by a monopoly is right down scary!
Yes, but I wager Live.com has a much bigger than any audience you have.
somewhere between 2 to 6 times more (I haven't checked our latest numbers). why's that make a difference, though? Whether it's one guy in a basement writing a site for 300 visitors, or a team of 40 writing a site for 2 million, you still have to spend a significant effort in proportion to the rest of the project to enable the system for the 3-5% of users who don't have javascript functionality. Either way, it's not cost effective unless you need low-end compatibility and maximum user coverage for some business reason, which a web portal+search doesn't seem to.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
I can see the thinking here. Tell all the web citizens of this cool new site (that is no more than a copy of existing services)and make loud comments on how everyone will use it. Set it up as the default page of the next release of Windows$ and say hey look at all the people using it.
"Never say Never."
Future-proofing. Do you think a semantic web agent will understand your temporally volatile webpage? The web is designed "stateless," and it should stay that way; if you want a stateful medium, create another protocol.
I hate JavaScript as much as the GP probably does, but for sites that are designed to work that way (e.g. live.com and Google's personalised homepage), I can understand the use of JavaScript/ECMAScript. However, your stupid floaty menu widget can be accomplished perfectly in CSS, and for browsers that don't support that, there are both JavaScript fallbacks and simple browser-based fallbacks that will still allow the user to view the site just fine.
Basically, designing to degrade gracefully is what you need to do.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
To use any feature on that site requires javascript...
Well, yes. They'll get it working first, and worry about the no-script audience later, if at all.
Windows Live is nothing more than a bloated portal page.
In an ideal situation, yes. But again, sometimes the cost of designing for degradation is more than it's worth.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
because start.com, the beta version of live.com, predates google.com/ig. You can read the post here Google copied Microsoft. Check and mate.
That's find for homepages, but once you get serious you cannot rely on javascript.
In many companies I've dealt with internally javascript is disabled as a part of the corporate security policy. A site that will not work without it (possibly slightly degrared) is just broken. You don't *need* flashy animations and drop down menus. Really.
No offense, but those companies are being really overly paranoid. Javascript is so badly crippled in the name of security that it requires hacks to get it to do USEFUL things, let alone seruptitious activity. Nobody's going to perform any serious security breaches using Javascript without having enough access to the system to cripple it in much less roundabout ways.
And I agree, usually animations and dropdowns are not totally necessary, but it also depends on what you're writing. If it's more of an application-style website, you might have to keep two completely independent implementations of every bit of functionality in order to let it degrade, and that's not cost-effective. And depending on your traffic profile, doing things client-side may be the difference between needing 20 web servers and needing 40. Four postbacks to navigate to a page when you could do the same with 2k of javascript and one postback is nothing to sneeze at.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
..."the crap has nothing to do with the penalty,"
I think you missed the point, I Googled [bmw autohaus finden] and got BMW's Dealership finder. This was in the gap, just after the penalty had been lifted and just before the BMW site was recrawled. I did the same for many of the keyphrases BMW should be top for that were on that page of keywords Matt showed on his blog.
That BMW site is probably the only good result for that query! After the recrawl BMW disappeared, that penalty directly caused the bad result.
"BTW, googling for "BMW..."
Yeh, unfortunately going to bmw.de and typing 'autohaus finden' in the search box doesn't pull up BMWs dealership finder.