For those of you living under a rock, Windows Vista has been officially released as of today, January 30th. Bill Gates announced the launch of Vista at an event in New York City today, with the help of the band Angels and Airwaves. We're still waiting to see what kind of Windows Live integration we can expect in the lifespan of Vista aside from the obvious shortcuts to Live products.
I personally have been running the final build of Vista for a couple of months on my laptop, pretty much without incident. In my opinion, it is a big step up from XP and I would highly reccomend Vista to anyone who can run it on their machine.
Apparently, "The Wow Starts Now." Hopefully the "Wow" starts now for Windows Live too. Enjoy the launch day.
Grab the press release here.
Yes the beta has drawn to a close and Windows Live Messenger 8.1 is now available. Nice work by Dwergs in getting the English download link, no doubt he'll be posting the other language builds shortly.
Download Windows Live Messenger 8.1
Updates from 8.0 include:
- Yahoo interoperability - now you can chat to your Yahoo Messenger friends from Windows Live Messenger
- Your display name, status and personalization roam with you to any computer
- Improved sign-in performance
- Redesigned contact cards
- A bonus of 2 free VOIP calls
- And it runs on Windows Vista!
Update:
Nicole, from the MessengerSays blog has posted their official "End of Beta" announcement. It is available for download from the get.live.com Messenger page. In addition to the features that we posted earlier, Nicole notes these new features:
- SMS Phone Book
- Improved Usability
- Vista Presentation Mode
- Personal Contact Invitations
Again, you can check out the team's blog post here: MessengerSays.
Spaces launched a new build last week, notably with the ability to embed videos. But there's quite a bit new under the hood, too. Jason Antonelli of the Spaces team posted on his blog about some of the new improvements.
Of course the embedded video is the big news, and support for "dozens of new markets" - with more to come. Jason also fixed a bug "that prevented me from removing ads from the top of the page using sponsored spaces feature". Nice to be able to fix bugs when they really bother you!
Jason also reveals that a lot of work went into a new mechanism to deploy new Spaces builds without affecting the live site. Remember the mess during the switch from MSN Spaces to Windows Live Spaces (10.5)? Well that's been fixed.
Some other improvements (from Jason's blog entry):
- We did a lot of cleanup work -- including making a small step towards XHTML compliance, running static code analysis tools on our code base, moving to better libraries and practices to prevent XSS-type exploits, etc.
- We moved to an entirely new configuration system -- the Spaces application has 100s of settings that can be configured -- we moved to a much better system to manage this.
- Several releases back we moved our recent updates and recent tags logic to a different service which was causing all sorts of problems -- we basically rewrote this code (which somewhat just told me about a bug that I need to fix :-)
- Lots, lots more.
A concerted effort by the various MSN teams in a project apparently dubbed "The January Effect" will result in a significant portal-wide update over the coming weeks. An updated user-interface will be the most obvious change, as will some of the new features such as polls, ratings and message boards, all designed to increase user interaction across the various MSN properties.
In an article following the release of Microsoft's First Quarter Earnings Report, CNET News.com reports that "Microsoft's Live branding has been tremendously confusing and has hurt the company". According to the article:
"While Microsoft doesn't break out the financial figures for its new Live services from its established MSN content services, both of which make up its Internet services business, it's likely the newer brand is what is weighing things down.
"Microsoft's Live branding has been tremendously confusing and has hurt the company, and it is very likely contributing to the situation they are in right now," said David Smith, an analyst at Gartner. "They've created another brand and have not differentiated it."
It's too early to pass "final judgment" on the strategy, Smith said. But now is the time for Microsoft to clearly explain its strategy, he said."
In a related article, also on News.com, while Microsoft continues to invest heavily in search, they admit to losing market share:
"On the search side you are correct we lost market share," Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell said in response to an analyst's question on the company's earnings conference call. He said he is "clearly not happy with that."
Liddell said Microsoft continues to "take a long-term view of this business" and that the company is making progress in some areas. The company also hopes this year to turn the tide in its revenue per search query. "We still expect to get revenue per search equal to where we were a year ago by the end of this year," he said.
Microsoft continues to take a long term approach to Live services, and as we have been saying at LiveSide, it's still very early in the game. We've also said however that the approach to Windows Live branding has been unclear. We agree with Gartner's Smith that the time is now to clearly explain Windows Live brand.
Just in time for Valentine's day; after all, what kind of presents do geeks give? Windows Live OneCare is closing the beta, but for a limited time you can get a 3 PC 1-year subscription for only $19.95. You don't even have to be a beta participant, just sign-in with your Windows Live ID at http://get.live.com/onecare/introCC1. Be sure to sign up for this offer by February 12!
@Matthew
Contrary to the belief that OneCare 1.5 will be available from 30th January, it is now available on the OneCare website for download. Choose to download the 90 day free trial, and its all yours. If you are running Windows Vista, this is probably a must-have.
http://onecare.live.com
For people already running OneCare, you'll be prompted to automatically update.
Well since Steve Kafka reads LiveSide, we wanted to let him know we read him, too! In addition to the features listed on the Mail Call blog, Steve points out that the new Live Mail M9 includes better contacts import, and now also contains contacts export, to a number of CSV file formats, including Yahoo! Mail and GMail. Check out the Options page in Live Mail to import or export contacts. The export feature will export all of your contacts fields if they're supported, too, so you can save your notes etc, and import them into Outlook, your phone, or even good old Excel. Of course this is a feature that should be included in any email client, but it's nice to see it appear in Live Mail. You're right Steve, they're our contacts, after all!
If you are a current OneCare subscriber (or have an active free trial), expect to be upgraded to version 1.5 in the next few days, according to the OneCare blog. Windows Live OneCare will be officially released on January 30, to coincide with the Vista launch, as 1.5 supports Vista, but current subscribers will be seeing it sooner.
The OneCare blog makes the Jan 30 date official, and lists the countries where OneCare will be available:
We've been talking about our next major release for a long time, and now we are finally making it official. Today we announced that Windows Live OneCare v1.5 will be rolling out to customers in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States on January 30th.
In addition, current beta testers (who will have to uninstall the beta and install the final version) can expect a special offer, a significant discount for a year's subscription as a thank you for beta testing. If you are a beta tester, expect an email within the next few days.
Just after we received a tip that Windows Live Mail was at M9, Ben Poon posted on the Mail Call that indeed the next version of the beta is being deployed.
What's new with the new build? Well first and foremost, it's fast. For those of us that have been with the beta since the beginning, Windows Live Mail has gone from being quite the slug to impressively fast.
Next, comes news from Ben that "classic mode" which came about in direct response to feedback, and first appeared in M5, will now be the default transition mode for those that transfer over from Hotmail. Apparently the Windows Live Mail interface with the reading pane takes some getting used to, and "classic" is like Hotmail, but with more features, a cleaner look, and more speed. Ben says that WL Mail classic is faster than Hotmail, and in just playing around with it now it seems very fast indeed.
The migration from M8 to M9 is being phased in, so if you're using Windows Live Mail and don't see any difference (the new build is 11.09.0000.0119), then you should be seeing it within a week or so.
When will this beta run out of "M"s and be released to the world, bringing with it @live.com addresses and a transition from Hotmail for the 200 million users worldwide? Truthfully we were expecting it already, but some final tweaking on the Classic mode seemed to be in order to get ready for the big switch. Shouldn't be long now, and it will be very interesting to see how all those Hotmail users react to the Windows Live brand.
Thanks to quikboy for reminding us to post about a new effort by Windows Live Search to promote ninemillion.org, a UN program to help refugee children. For every Live Search made at Click4theCause from Jan 17 til March 31, Live Search will donate to ninemillion.org.
Ninemillion.org is a UN Refugee Agency led campaign to raise awareness and funds for education and sport programs for refugee youth, many of whom are forced to spend years of their young lives away from home with little hope of returning.
Learn more about Click4theCause, the Live Search effort.
Visit ninemillion.org
Visit nine-million.spaces.live.com
Add the ninemillion gadget to your Spaces or Live.com
The latest incremental version WL Messenger is set to be released as soon as January 25th, according to a post on Windows X's Shrine. Whether or not it meets that actual date, the new version should be out to the public very soon. Picturepan2 lists the features and improvements of the new version:
• Redesigned, smarter contact cards give you more data about and easier access to your friends
• Your display name, status and personalization roam with you to any computer
• Try PC-to-phone calling with two free calls to virtually any phone in the world*
• Better server performance
• Improvements to automatic updates
• Improved sign-in performance
BTW speaking of Messenger, Wendy "the Mighty" posted an interesting plea for opting in to the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), saying that the information is very useful to Microsoft in tracking down problems, and that very few users actually opt in.
Windows Live Maps has updated some of its imagery, adding Miami to the list of cities you can explore in 3D, as well as updating to high-res imagery for numerous other locations.
To show the difference between high-res and the standard imaging, I zoomed in to maximum detail for Portland and Manhatten, using cars as the reference points. If you can ignore the obvious "stitching" between the old and new imagery, you can see how improved the sharpness and clarity of the high-res images are.
The update seems to be as follows:
3d: Miami
High-res: Manhatten, Portland, Bellevue, Miami, Philadelphia, several areas of California including San Diego, and for those north of the border; Hamilton, Ontario.
With Steve Berkowitz firing on all cylinders to keep the MSN brand rolling, the start of 2007 should see MSN taking back some of the spotlight from Windows Live.
First up is MSN to go, the new MSN Mobile service. Similar to its Windows Live counterpart, MSN to go offers users a homepage for their mobile device, with both Windows Live Mail and Search integration. Where it differs though is that unlike the mobile Live.com, MSN to go does not have all the customisation options such as gadgets and feeds, instead focusing on providing MSN content such as news, sports and movie times.
The new MSN mobile homepage follows the recent launch of the Soapbox mobile page, reinforcing the belief that mobile is one of the areas where Microsoft's online efforts are equal to, if not better than, its rivals. The only concern is that users may become overwhelmed with the number of mobile services now available to them, especially when it comes to mobile messaging.
Check it out and let us know what you think. MSN or Windows Live mobile?
MSN to go: http://beta.mobile.msn.com/ on your mobile device (PC link)
Windows Live mobile: http://mobile.live.com/ on your mobile device (PC Link / Homepage)
The San Jose Mercury News on Sunday posted two interesting articles written by Elise Ackerman, one - Hooked on Google, replays some depressing numbers for Windows Live Search, offers up Google as the new Microsoft, as Microsoft was the new IBM, and offers some frank assessments of the (non) ease-of-use of Microsoft's adCenter.
In the other post, a short interview with Steve Berkowitz, Why Ask.com's CEO left to join Microsoft, Berkowitz talks about experience over technology, and how Microsoft has to change from looking inside out (developing technology and finding a place for it in the marketplace) to looking outside-in (offering user experiences, with the technology in the background).