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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
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!!"
It already will be. I'm attending Uni in Mississippi, and we are required to check our email daily. I imagine this policy is common elsewhere.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
...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?
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
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.
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