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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."
Can they do that?
From the article:
"But although there has been a rapid uptake of the service, the company says it still meets resistance and skepticism. In return, Microsoft has been assuring education institutions that its only motivation is to get students using Windows Live, promising there are no ulterior plans."
Funnypics
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".
I am not sure were that IE6 only blurb came from.
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!!"
I signed up to use the hotmail live beta, and it takes FOREVER to reload the screen.. gmail refreshes just about instantly..
Also, I can't even see my folders - after using hotmail live for about a minute, the folders section is reduced to about 1mm in size.... also, when you are reading EVERY email, there is an AD right next to the email reading window - and so you are forced to read that stupid ad with every email that you read...
msn/hotmail live SUX! they are just trying badly to copy gmail! maybe their servers are clogged up or something to explain the bad refresh speed...
http://www.psychopanic.com
...any college that would sign this sort of exclusivity deal probably doesn't have much in the way of, oh, how shall we say, a progressive-minded fast-paced cutting-edge technological studies / computer science department - by which I mean that this list of 72 colleges (which I don't believe was published - I skimmed TFA) is more likely to be "Ben Doke's Midtown College of Applied Farm Machineary" and "Oral Roberts God Fearing U" and 70 other semi-community colleges than it is "M.I.T." and "UC-Berkeley" and other notable names from the Ivy League and Division I-A - and students who'd attend the sort of college that would sign a deal as stupid and moronic as this are probably the sorts who'll be happily locked into Windows anyway, for the rest of the foreseeable future. Or the mildly sociopathic types who'll get a perverse thrill out of signing up for distance learning Web CT classes, then informing the instructor that they won't be able to check their validated campus email because they run Linux ;)
So, uh, all hype, and it's sorta nerdy - but does it matter?
drops out freshman year, forms harmless little start-up to develop webOS, and goes on to take over the world.
tidokoro
what turns a man's karma neutral? lust for gold? power? or just a heart born full of neutrality?
>> The Redmond company believes that catching the students early on will turn them into life-long users of Windows Live
.. if you love someone, set them free? :)
Who was it that said
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);
Web mail is great if you want an email where you can filter spam or from those porn site you don't tell your wife about.
It's not nearly as good as an e-mail client where you can organize, flag, set rules, mark certain domains with colors bla bla. Also, who wants to refresh the page every x minutes to check for email, or have it reloading and wasting a IE page or tab in firefox/opera whatever when you can just have a small client open and every x minute goes and checks for messages. And the lack of forwarding sucks. What if you want to forward yesterday's notes to your lab partner(s) because he was out sick? Not supporting POP? I'm not sure that's such a big deal, unless it means it doesn't have a pop server that you can't log into. If that's true then see my above comments.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Does anyone have a link to the list of schools who are planning on implementing this?
Windows Live Goes to College
About time somebody went to college... I hear the founder was a dropout
I love humanity, it is people I hate
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...
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???
Yeah, most of Windows Live does. Try using Windows Live Mail with Firefox...it isn't pretty to say the least. All of the features that make Windows Live Mail better than Hotmail are gone, and some of the features that make Hotmail usable are gone as well. You can't even mark a message as unread in Live Mail while using Firefox. No drag and drop, no preview pane. I have a Hotmail account that was using Windows Live Mail, but it is useless on my Mac, so I have now switched back to the Hotmail interface. My main email is gmail though, thank god.
I invited my non-tech friend to Gmail, and she used it as a second email account for a while. After trying out Windows Live Mail, she switched to Gmail on her main account, not liking the direction Hotmail was going.
I can't use any standard email client with it.
I think that was one of the design goals.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
A uni's CS department has absolutely no relation to the general mail services, or student network, of the university. Whether the CS department is badly managed or wonderfully managed, they will likely hate the people who run the main network if it's anything like my experience.
My uni has a decent CS department, who run everything for their department themselves. We have access to their solaris machines and we have all of the normal mail (POP3/IMAP/SMTP) services, and can SSH to the machines etc. etc.
The university however (and anyone on any other course) has to make use of crappy Novell Netware webmail. I could easily see them moving to this new MS system if the managers high up in the IT department were sent enough free copies of Office by MS, or whatever they are bribing them all with.
When this list is published, expect to see a lot of top uni's with deccent CS departments in there. And whether or not they have a decent CS department or not, we can't say "oh it's ok, they don't have MIT so it doesn't mean anything" - MS are still going to be forcing literally hundreds of thousands of upcoming young adults into only knowing their own proprietary system.
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.
Sorry bud, works great here. Firefox 1.5.0.2.
There is no preview pane.
Sure is! Pretty pictures and all. Looks like Bush is probing gas prices.
There is no interactivity whatsoever.
I can drag/drop windows around, pop config menus, hit the +,- buttons, sure works great for me!
Suggest upgrading your Firefox. Or turning Javascript back on. One of the two.
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.