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Microsoft Ties Windows Live Services to OS

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the adoption-by-ramrod dept.

narramissic writes "Microsoft is tying its Windows Live services directly to Vista — a move that should sound vaguely familiar, as it is precisely what the company did to make IE ubiquitous among Internet users. 'A new unified installer for Windows Live services will help users download Wednesday's updates of photo-sharing, mail, instant messaging, online safety and other services, the company said on its Windows Live Wire blog. The new installer also will automatically update those services on Windows Vista and XP going forward.'"

9 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Wrong by bheer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The problem with Internet Explorer was bundling with the Operating System (not that it was a technically bad thing to do).

    In this case, it's a web download. Big deal. And it probably saves time for those who use all of MSN's services and needs to install/update them. Doesn't Google do this already with Google Pack (including the auto-update) ?

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    1. Re:Wrong by bheer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      > It's a *fundamentally* bad thing to do. It lead to an awful lot of remote code execution exploits.

      Providing a web browser EXE and standard URL parsing (urlmon), Network handling (wininet and now winhttp) and rendering (shdocvw) components + APIs as part of the base OS package is in no imaginable way a bad idea. Don't confuse MS's implementation for the RIGHT way to design things.

      The BIG problem with IE4-6 was Microsoft using their brand-new HTML renderer to render *everything* -- as part of the "let's make it so that people can't help but use IE and forget about Netscape" strategy.

      So everything from help to the filesystem to to the desktop to, god help us, system dialogs starting becoming render surfaces for HTML (the post-Win2K Add/Remove dialog uses shdocvw, and yes, you can use it too 'uninstall' IE. I think that's pretty funny.) Looks like no one thought for a minute about tainted input.

      The comparatively smaller (because they didn't have the previous problem this would be less of a deal) problem is Microsoft's brain dead IE Zones model (which they moved away from in .NET, thankfully -- but IE+ActiveX is still stuck with it). At least with IE7 they've figured out how to separate the browser from the file manager. Removing that one "feature" alone decreased the attack surface 4X.

      > In fact, it's a fundamentally poor practice in secure systems design.

      No. Ignoring taint analysis is fundamentally poor systems design. Including a browser and standard browser-ish components and APIs makes just as much sense as including a TCP/IP stack with the OS.

      But hey, as everyone knows, Windows just sorta evolved. It wasn't intelligently designed or anything :-)

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    2. Re:Wrong by BenoitRen · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Including a browser and standard browser-ish components and APIs makes just as much sense as including a TCP/IP stack with the OS.

      What you seem to ignore in every post is that since IE4 it wasn't just that that was being done. IE was integrated in the sense that it planted itself in explorer.exe and shell32.dll, essentially taking over your entire desktop environment. Everyone was instantly subjected to all of IE's bugs and crashes, even though they weren't browsing the Internet.

  2. Windows Live - obsolete by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been using Hotmail since '99, before M$ bought them out. After that, Hotmail (like other M$ products) became slower and more bloated with every "update". Now they can't(or don't want to because of backroom deals) filter out junk mail which goes directly into my inbox because spammers are spoofing my own e-mail address( how irritating )! Then there's the constant "legit" M$ spam which gets into my inbox at least 3-4 times a week no matter what my filter settings are. Fuck that. My primary account is now a Gmail one.

  3. Re:.Mac service by i_love_unix · · Score: 2, Interesting

    But Mac users are neither nearly as ubiquitous nor as tied (real or imagined) to the OS as Windows users.

  4. Well in messenger's defense by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It was a lot better than ICQ or AIM, which were the other big two. ICQ started really going down hill especially when spammers started to figure it out. I pretty much stopped using it in late 1998/early 1999. AIM is, well, AOL. While I've not doubt the packaging helped it, I think it was also that you were getting ICQ expats looking for something new that didn't bite. MSN may not have been perfect, but it was the best I found.

  5. Re:The Slash-FUD rolls on.... by RobertM1968 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sure... they were one post up I think....

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/18/microsof t_advertising_pc_patent/

    Part of which state:

    Microsoft has filed a patent (here) that threatens to breathe life into Bill Gates' and Ray Ozzie's Frankenstein-like Windows Live "vision", unveiled in November 2005, for putting annoying, in-your-face internet adverts inside your most important Windows applications.

    Which references this Patent:

    http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1 =PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO% 2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220070157227%22.P GNR.&OS=DN/20070157227&RS=DN/20070157227

    The patent and the article go into more detail... but some neat parts are section 8 and 11 - as well as the other parts that would indicate the need for a cross-program API (thus linking Word, whatever Outlook is called today, various other Live services, IE and who knows what else) in order to fulfill that need.

    This new post seems to be one of the steps needed. TheRegister and others seem to have speculated such tying together of products - even before this announcement was made. If that happens, do you honestly think (that once this is out of beta) MS will ask you if you want to do this when MS has to do this in order to make their advertising/spying framework operate? I dont. Especially with the "coincidence" of this announcement being the major step that they need to make mainstream in order to make it happen.

    I could be wrong... but I doubt it... and other tech people have already speculated it with the patent (and one other that I cant dig up) seem to support quite nicely.

    -Robert

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  6. Re:The Slash-FUD rolls on.... by Jon.Laslow · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think you may have hit the nail on the head when you say "updates". Remember, "Microsoft Update" has the ability to pull updates for other, already installed Microsoft apps, not just Windows. Chances are, your server pulled them because Microsoft made these updates available for already installed clients. Try actually doing those updates on a naked-install of Windows and see what happens. Then post screenshots!

  7. Wrong by mpapet · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A monopoly, by itself, is nothing more...

    No. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_maker

    A concise, widely accepted and universally taught analysis of why monopolies are bad: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss The deadweight loss is what you and I lose in dollars and units under Microsoft's market control.

    The first is legal; the second is not.

    Let's leave "legal" and "illegal" to the lawyers and increasingly the politicians who control the DOJ.

    Please divorce yourself from these politically expedient ideas. They directly harm you.

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