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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."
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!!"
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.
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.
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