Slashdot Mirror
Windows Live Goes to College
Tobias writes "BetaNews is reporting that Microsoft has struck a deal with 72 different colleges to use Windows Live for their email services. The problem with this is that Windows Live does not support any browsers besides IE 6, does not support POP or IMAP, and does not support email forwarding." From the article: "The Redmond company believes that catching the students early on will turn them into life-long users of Windows Live. They would likely create a Windows Live Messenger account, start a blog and organize their favorites under this e-mail account -- especially if they plan to continue using it, Microsoft says."
until they slip some cash to some people who then make it a mandatory part of the "college experience". Reminds me of the tobacco companies, "hook 'em while they're young".
And the one that Microsoft just can never seem to grasp, and probably the reason why so many people just don't want anything to do with them, is that there always has to be a hook.
Some might argue that Google have a hidden agenda (and no-one has quite worked out what that is yet) but with their offerings such as their GMail for Businesses, regular GMail, Calendar, etc there isn't a 'hook' - its just there. You use it, you don't - You like it, you don't - so what.
With Microsoft its always something like "We want to get people to be lifelong users" or "We reserve the right to turn on adverts when people graduate" - there is always a caveat or other reason rather than "This is a damn good product - we think it will sell itself".
I can't wait to be rid of Windows at home and just be done with Microsoft.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
It's things like this which governments should be keeping a close eye on, not bundled media players. Bundling a media player doesn't lock you in; keeping protocols changing and closed (in this case ActiveX) does.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
The problem is, even if the school does have "progressive-minded fast-paced cutting-edge technological studies / computer science department", they won't be part of the negotations and decision making process. That will be up to managers in the central IT department and other non-technically minded business administrators. I work at a University and Microsoft have already offered this "solution", to management of course! It also turns out that students will get ads, unless the University pays for an ad free service.
Do they really think they're going to compete with gmail that late in the kids' lives?
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
And cigarettes... Hook em while they are young, and you have them for life.
:(
MS, used to be "good" used to be the underdog taking on IBM and Big Iron. Bringing affordable computing to the little guy, breaking the Vender Lock In (tm)...
"Whoever battles monsters should take care not to become a monster too, for if you stare long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss stares also into you."
--Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, chapter 4, no. 146
Its a shame, really it is...
The article makes no mention about IE6.
The slashdot poster must have added his just added the extra spice to get posted on slashdot.
As far as your 'in other words' interpretation please go check out the channel9 presentations on windows live wherein they talk about their support for firefox.
Wrong! Most students will not have an opinion until they experience it. Many will still not have an opinion after that.
"Most dont know or want to know what pop/smtp/imap are"
True, but they will find out the hard way that their e-mail service is lacking something that they can't name. At the latest, they will do so when they try to read their e-mail in some webcafé or similar place that only has a non-IE browser. They will also notice that a lot of their friends have a choice of mail clients, whereas they do not.
When I built an e-mail system for a business school, I was positively surprised by the amount of people who were actually knowledgable far beyond my expectations and they were really opinionated. Freedom of choice matters even among non-CS students. The CS students will of course be outraged and disgusted.
I think a remarkable amount of students will rely on gmail for their e-email.
Lemon curry???
CS department? Since when is it the job of the CS department to administer the mail servers? Or any servers for that matter? The CS department studies computer science, not IT.
You might say that if the CS department had any clout in terms of IT decisions that they would use that clout to block the adoption of this service. That said, I'm not sure the faculty in technical fields have much say in anything. I'm an undergrad at a university with a well-respected Computer Engineering department and the department's IT staff mandates crappy and broken "web boards" instead of newsgroups, won't set up servers for things like CVS/SVN (supposedly they'd rather try to roll their own web-based stuff, so classes tend to use whatever places they have available to set up repositories) and refuses to set up a Linux lab when that's what a class desires (instead we had a lab of Windows machines running Linux under Virtual PC, which is mostly adequate but sometimes a bit of a pain). The web-based portal that all their services go through has a bunch of ads on it, which is probably the reason they want as many services as possible to rely on it. The students and the faculty don't have a lot of choice in the matter. Either way, we can still learn the same ideas even if we don't always do it in the most elegant way possible.
In other words, they are incompetent.
Wrong. Never attribute to stupidity what can be adequately explained by malice.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
You are certainly underestimating MS here - I'm sure it took a lot of effort and collaboration between the IE and MS Live teams to ensure that they create a product which works well on IE6 but is feature limited on Firefox.
If it's not proprietry why do they need to "add support for more browsers" ?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
They did it to lock people in. The entire model locks people in, as mentioned in the summary - the email does not allow you to access them with third-party clients, and does not allow you to get the mails anywhere where you can access them with third-party clients, unless you do it manually for every single mail you get.
The entire thing will be a serious pain in the ass for anyone with even mediocre IT savvy; the people who are used to using a web client will have no problems and are the easy audience for MS here (with MS hoping to use the structure of Windows Live to keep them as clients when they leave, since then they keep all their contacts etc); and the setup also forces the rest of the students - those who would prefer to do things in any of a variety of other ways - to stoop to using their system. MS are effectively pulling in a pile of easy targets, and then putting a big wall around the hard targets so they are stuck whether they like it or not. As seen in a good thread above, the common language means it does function in FF, but breaks its major featureset. Anyone in firefox will be stuck with a closed interface, and you won't find bets against that improving in a hurry, because it would be a door in that big wall MS are setting up.
Whether or not they're losing lockin elsewhere, they've jumped on the opportunity to get a new generation before that generation gets savvy enough to get up in arms about what's being done to them. Sure, there'll be a few, but not enough until someone writes an interface that shapes packets to enable automation of the features that MS are intentionally leaving out.
IMAP has been around for 20 years; POP3 for 12. The longevity and widespread use of these protocols is vast in terms of the internet and email; 20 years is a vast timespan for this arena. Yet MS have designed something that prevents both. I have no idea how long automatic email forwarding has been around for, but again it's something that MS have left out.
When I saw the summary on the front page, I saw it was tagged 'monopoly'. I initially dismissed that, because I thought that with email you can't get a monopoly so the tag was irrelevant in this case. But when you force, force, force people to use your system with no way of connecting it up to their other systems, and use the weight of an educational institution to enable that lockin, then it is indeed a monopoly. They're not getting any money from it yet (I very much hope an institution wouldn't pay for this system) so the traditional connotations of 'monopoly' aren't there yet - but they're forcing people in while and where they can't do anything about it. Keep the number of people, they'll get their profits, whether it's in systems required to be able to use their services or something further down the line for Windows Live.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
I work in a large (many say prestigious) hospital where they use Windows 2K terminals to access patient records, labs, X-rays, page doctors, order tests, etc. These are not only mission critical functions, but potentially life critical. Every time a decent worm/virus rolls around, the computer system become unusable and we are left in the dark so to speak (take this in to account the next time you write a worm you damn script kiddies). It is truly scary when this happens because the backup systems are paper, sneaker and phone based.
It amazes me that the hospital IT department continues to use Windows, especially since most of the functions are web based. Unfortunately, the programs only work on IE. I keep hoping that they decide to switch away from Windows before something truly bad happens.
Once the universities go through a few worm/virus cycles where they can't access the system (either because of server or client side problems) for a few days, they might reconsider their choice.
bad choice for innovation.
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" Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. "
G. Orwell
Lessee - a filtered search engine, control of all incoming and outgoing communications, a Media Center telescreen on the wall at the commons and in most of the rooms...
Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?
O'Brien: Of course he exists.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Since Windows Live is an online service, why not discontinue e-mail service in universities for students completely? After all, its a lot of work, money (hardware, support, licenses) and infrastructure for a very transient population.
;-)
The school for itself should downgrade its e-mail servers to a simpler setup for just staff and researchers. This is probably more for legal reasons (eg. need to keep backup copies of important communications) than for security (eg. press forward to "@gmail.com" and its gone)
Just let students fill in their own e-mail account, or ask them to create one at hotmail, yahoo, google or their own preference on enrollment; just force them to click on an "this account really works" e-mail on enrollment. Make it a requirement that students have a working e-mail account. And of course they can make a new one just for the "university" part of their life.
You mentioned:
* Student can keep using the account after graduation (+1)
* Students have no need to learn "Another Stupid Broken E-mail client" TM because the university requires this
* University has less need for its own infrastructure (+2)
* No need to login / authenticate against university servers when outside the campus (security +1)
Issues:
* Less Privacy ? But then , the university itself is now less likely to "peak" at your e-mails (+2)
* Make sure you get your free e-mail in Russia if you are paranoid about US government snooping
And I am sure that the university can get a good deal for a Google Mail hosted students.standford.edu account or something
I can recall when the www.live.com portal was launched. At the time, it did not support Firefox. IIRC, at the time, MS received many jeers for not supporting Firefox, and many indicated that it never would. I don't know when this changed, but I am now able to use the live portal without issue in Firefox - including all the AJAX functionality (granted, I could be wrong on some details) - it seems to work identical to IE.
Now, forgive me for saying so, but it seems like a nobrainer that MS would focus on IE functionality first. It is their browser and, lets not forget, it does have the larger marketshare. Frankly, I don't really blame them. I don't know if this will change in the (near) future, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it did.
At least in my experience, college is when a fair number of people experiment with OSes other than Windows; I've met a few people recently who seem to have had their first exposure to Linux in college or university, because they tend to be institutions large enough to support a more varied computer culture than high schools. (And also at some larger Unis there is still vestiges of a 'UNIX culture' tradition that predates Microsoft.)
It seems more like MS wants to solidify its hold on people that it probably already has its hooks into, to some extent, and keep them from jumping ship while they're in a position to.
If you think about it, once you leave college and are out working, your free time to do something like switch OSes goes way down. Also, with your first paychecks (assuming you graduate with some sort of productive employment) the free-as-in-beer draw of Linux might not be the deal-maker that it was to a college student. College is a good time for someone to switch OSes, if they're not happy with Windows, particularly to Linux (because the other candidate, Apple, is a bit expenisve or perceived as being).
I think this is not really so much an attempt to get its hold on users, as its an attempt to get them further in.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It's not only the personal inconvenience that's involved. Wouldn't you question the administration's ability to make sound decisions in other areas, based on their bad decisions in areas that are visible. Would you want to attend a college run by a bunch of yahoos?
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
The Microsoft platform monopoly is very weak right now. Any web application designed for a single version of M$ will fail for about half of your users. While they still have sizable majority of OS use, you can't count on a specific version being present. When you permutate that with browser used, your numbers fall even more.
Less than 60% of people use IE 6. That means about two in five people will not be able to use this stupid service.
Even M$ OS share is slipping. XP, the "dominant" platform only has 79% of the market. If you take out what people use at work, the Linux + Mac percentage is probably better than 10% now.
So, while IE 6 is "available" to a majority of users, 25% prefer something else. In short, they care.
If your school cares, they won't be using this service.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.