OurView: The Opinion Blog

Microsoft announced today that after June 30, 2009, Windows Live OneCare will be shut down, and that Microsoft is working on a new, free, small footprint anti-virus solution code-named “Morro”.  Ina Fried at CNET News and others have been playing this as somewhat of a bold move by Microsoft, to somehow disrupt the market held by Symantec and McAfee by offering a free AV solution.

I’m not so sure.  From here, this looks much more like spin on the failure of OneCare.  Regardless of what Morro becomes, and more about that in a bit,  OneCare hasn’t had the impact that Microsoft had hoped.  While Microsoft touts OneCare’s “award winning” status, it also garnered some embarrassing negative press, and certainly wasn’t or isn’t held in high regard as a leader in anti-virus software (or a leader in sales, for that matter).

Early on, OneCare succumbed to the kind of bloatware that had made other security suites almost unusable, bundling in printer sharing, online backup, tune-up automation, and other fluff that seemed designed as much to hide the core software’s shortcomings as to add value.  Indeed, today’s press release seems to try and distance itself from these “additional non-security features” as it sets up Morro to be something different:

By shifting to focus on the core anti-malware features that most consumers still don’t keep up to date, “Morro” will be able to provide the essential protections that consumers need without overusing system resources, and will help more consumers have better protection against online threats.

While Microsoft could have just kept on plugging away with OneCare, this was a product going decidedly in the wrong direction.  Windows Live OneCare painted itself into a corner in at least three areas:

1. One of the biggest feature requests for Windows 7 and beyond is for quicker startup and shutdown times.  By loading OneCare up with “additional non-security features”, OneCare at least incrementally slowed the system down at startup and shutdown.  Rather than continue down a path of fighting against itself, Microsoft has chosen to change course.  With Morro, it is pursuing a solution that “will be architected for a smaller footprint that will use fewer computing resources”.  And ensure, presumably, faster loading home PCs.
   
   
2. Scale.  In order to effectively gather information about virus threats, the larger the install base the better.  A Morro solution, with a small footprint and a hopefully much larger install base, will be better able to collect information on, and then stop, more malware.  Microsoft is continuing to pursue for-profit solutions like Forefront, which will share the malware protection engine with Morro, remember.
   
   
3. Online backup.  In a nutshell, OneCare online backup is at odds with SkyDrive, Live Sync (and the coming meshification of Windows Live), and Windows Live.  Continuing to offer disparate backup solutions hasn’t made much sense all along, and now that SkyDrive is offering 25gb of free storage, paying $50/yr for 50gb needed to go.  Pulling it, however, would have made OneCare a less compelling product.  A rock, as it were, and a hard place.
   

If Microsoft had succeeded with OneCare, it wouldn’t be pulling the plug now, regardless of the above discretions.  But OneCare hasn’t succeeded, and today’s announcement is more about terminating OneCare than it is about Morro, regardless of the spin.  And it remains to be seen whether running a less than stellar anti-malware engine as a free standalone will fare any better.

Not that Morro doesn’t present some compelling possibilities.  For one thing, OneCare’s failure may be more about the failure of the anti-malware suite in general than of any particular OneCare shortcomings.  Slow to load, hard to maintain, and a hard sell to consumers for any price other than “free with a rebate”, anti-malware programs aren’t a great consumer business to be in.  By offering a free, small footprint, no frills alternative, Microsoft gets out of a bad business, speeds up Windows, helps work on the malware problem (which MS rightly maintains is beginning to get real ugly, especially in emerging markets), and may help to position Windows Live as an answer to some of the “additional features” that OneCare tried to provide.

Still, we’re kind of sad to see OneCare go.  Less obtrusive than most, cute and almost pretty, OneCare seemed to try and do a good job, and not get too much in the way.  Here’s hoping Morro meets a better fate.

While the Professional Developer’s Conference has traditionally been associated with the operating system it introduces, make no mistake: This is the Ray Ozzie PDC.  Windows 7 made for a nice bit of eye candy after the ethereal and hard to grasp announcements around Windows Azure on Monday, but in the long run this PDC will not be remembered for a set of bug fixes and performance improvements to an unfinished Windows Vista.

Ray Ozzie was relaxed and confident onstage on Monday, was friendly and open when we met him at a blogger’s round table, and seemed genuinely relieved to be able to talk about where he’s taking Microsoft. For the first time, he was able to allow the pieces to fall into place: a massive data center buildout; a set of tools to manage cloud services; a seamless way to connect existing internal data, in whole or in part, to the cloud, all built with safety and security at the forefront.  Ray Ozzie is laying the groundwork for enterprise to move to the next generation of computing.  He knows he’s five years out from where it will all start really making sense, but that’s ok.

Steven Sinofsky has the Windows fortress firmly in hand, and the PDC crowd appreciated his no nonsense approach to fixing what ails Vista.  Professional developers aren’t, when it comes right down to it, all that innovative at all.  They build apps, mostly internal ones for business, and mostly ones that you or I will never see (although we gain the benefits, and feel the pain, of them every day).  They are appreciative of new tools to make producing quality code easier and better, but paradigm shifts aren’t really welcome news.  Sinofsky offered them up more of the same, just cleaned up, which is all they ever really want.  Ray Ozzie is going to pull them, sometimes kicking and screaming, into a new world order, and he can’t wait to get started.

Windows has some good years left, and Sinofsky will serve it well, but the future of computing is bigger than the desktop.  Ozzie is interested in connecting the cloud to the devices we use, changing the way we use both.  He’s interested in taking a long look at how we can store data more efficiently, and allowing us to spend less time getting at data and more time using it.  More than that, he is opening up the potential for new devices and new ways of thinking about the data we hold dear.  Windows may continue to play a role in Ozzie’s new Microsoft, especially short term, but he has his sights set on a larger vision.

Of course many in attendance at PDC this week aren’t buying into the vision, at least not yet.  Bill Gates’ original vision of a computer on every desk running Microsoft software has long since come to pass (minus 7% or so), and frankly the company has been a little short in the vision department for the past few years.  I heard a lot of talk about a lack of trust in Microsoft, a lack of trust in letting precious data outside the hallowed walls of IT data centers. Of course I’m old enough to have heard about lack of trust in keeping precious data on computers in the first place, too.

Where Microsoft faces its biggest challenges in this paradigm shift is in the battle to get people to believe in this new vision, and to stop shooting itself in the foot when talking about anything that isn’t technical.  The technology, especially the way the many pieces of Ozzie’s vision fit together, is beautifully elegant.  Microsoft’s efforts to market its vision has been anything but elegant, continuing with the announcements this week.  We heard about Live Mesh, Live Services, Live Framework, and Windows Live, all somewhat incoherently slightly different versions of the same thing. Yet the one product Microsoft has introduced in the past ten years that was begging for a technical name to appeal to the geeks that need to learn it was named, inexplicably and unpronounceably (and apparently at the last minute), Azure.

Microsoft has found a new technical leader in Ray Ozzie, a man capable of doing what Bill Gates did for personal computing, except this time in the cloud.  In Steven Sinofsky Windows is in good hands, and Windows 7 and 8 and 9 will under promise with startling accuracy, and ever so slightly over deliver, all according to plan.  Ballmer is Ballmer, pounding the streets and making sales.  Will someone emerge to take the same kind of leadership role on the branding side?  Obviously no one has yet.  A clear, focused, unified strategy to tell the story about this new Ray Ozzie Microsoft would certainly help, but Ozzie is betting on the platform and not the brand.

So our post earlier in the week with all the Wave 3 download g-links may have annoyed a few people. Or more than a few people. But hey, we’re only fulfilling our roles as both fans and bloggers. Translucency versus transparency only gets you so far. And to keep that spirit, here’s how the download links came about:

• Softies clicked through to us from http://home-beta.live.com
• We’re sneaky, and started visiting the IP address
• We found a bunch of photos and the download buttons
• We right clicked and selected view source
• We kept checking back until the links went live, and even then we waited for a few days before posting

Hopefully this will now end the “OMGZZZZ lets go on a witch-hunt for the internal leaker” effect we’ve been seeing.  We stick to our manifesto, so our delay in posting is more than you’d get from any other blogger. Courtesy and respect work both ways, and in this current climate of silence, DMCAs and takedowns, the Windows and Windows Live teams don’t earn much of that. Plus, we don’t see Apple, Facebook, HTC or Google keeping many secrets right up until launch. Times have changed, your PR should be evolving with it.

(Full credit to the WL Hotmail PR team for putting up this teaser site we posted about last month, and for this week emailing it around to Hotmail subscribers.)

I’d like to hope this honest post means we don’t get the choke-grip from He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named. Unfortunately I think its too late for that.

Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta 

Windows Live Messenger 9 Beta

Windows Live Mail Beta + Calendar integration

Windows Live Movie Maker Beta

Windows Live Writer Beta

Windows Live Toolbar beta

Discuss the new betas in our Forums!

Earlier this week Apple held an event to announce the new lineup of iPods, an event which has been breathlessly anticipated in years past. This year, reaction was lukewarm, and the stock price dropped 4% immediately after the event. This year, unlike years past when nothing was known about what would be announced until Steve Jobs took the stage, every announcement had been “leaked”, or “reported”, or “blogged” days or weeks in advance.

Other recent news has been reported on well before the “fact” recently, too. Bloggers were checking shipping invoices to determine new iPhone shipments from China, announcements both large and small are relegated to afterthoughts, and mainstream news outlets turned rapidly to bloggers to get a better handle on breaking news.

We’ve had our share of finds here at LiveSide, too. Some would call them leaks, and although we’re not going to go into details, we don’t look at them that way at all. 99% of what we report on LiveSide is the result of dedication, hard work, poring through hundreds of blogs and hundreds of web addresses, establishing a network of fellow enthusiasts, the kind of stuff that would be right at home in any investigative journalist’s office. At times we’ve found what is supposedly “unreleased” information far too easily. Again without getting into details, much of what we post is just sitting there, if you know where to look or care enough to dig a bit.

It’s been three years almost since Windows Live was launched back in November of 2005, and the road from there to here has been anything but smooth. Almost from the beginning, no one could seem to answer the simple question “what is Windows Live?”. Rather than usher in a new era of live services, Windows Live instead cast doubt on the future of MSN and seemed to be going off in all directions at once. At the same time, a little incubation project called Start.com became Live.com, MSN Search became an in-house project, which became Windows Live Search, which became Live Search. MSN Hotmail became Windows Live Mail, and then Windows Live Mail – desktop appeared, and Windows Live Mail became Windows Live Hotmail. No one could seemingly figure out what to call maps. Was it Live Maps? Live Search Maps? Live Local? At times, in various places on the live.com domain, it was all three.

And yet for the past year and a half, with a new management in place, and new organizational connections with Windows, the utter mess that had plagued Windows Live was slowly but surely being cleaned up. Some services were shut down (Expo, Favorites), others were relegated back to MSN (Live Search), and still others were just kind of forgotten (remember the rogue little service called Windows Live Barcode?). Now, with the advent of Wave 3, for the first time, Windows Live should have a coherent structure and a coherent face.

And done right, Windows Live is and can be a compelling set of services. No one else offers anything so complete, with common storage, common contacts, a common interface, and a common user experience on the desktop or online, all accessed by a single sign-on. And no one else will offer such a complete range of products, for both the web and desktop: Mail, Messenger, Calendar, Events and Groups, Photos and Movie Maker, Spaces, and storage through SkyDrive, all managed by a single sign on and a single contact list, with granular permission controls.

No its not the 1st of April, Microsoft sent us (and mess.be again) a takedown for the Messenger Wave 3 screenshots posted on 11th August. If you’re wondering what the email looked like, check out this sample notice. Ours was from the same individual too, however as it was sent direct to our ISP we’ve had no discussion with MS about their concerns and just removed the “offending” items.

We wouldn’t mind it so much, but the post was 3 weeks old, and didn’t even contain a link to the download. Now that the build is available publicly on the internet, we’re not quite sure what this achieves. Guess someone is going to have to send Wikipedia a DMCA notice too. It does smell of trying to set a precedent, which makes us the wounded bull for the next few weeks. Good news for readers, bad news for Microsoft execs trying to manage their PR.

For future reference Microsoft, most of the time we respond to being nicely asked :)

There has been several debates raging today about the Olympics coverage from various media outlets thus far, and in particular regarding NBC in the US, who Microsoft have partnered with (see NBC doesn’t feature Bolt, has Silverlight take-up really done that well). While its still to early to judge the success of Silverlight, I’ve been focusing so far on following the progress of Live Search. At the start of the Olympics much was made about the tailoring of Live Search for this global event, and it was some of the comments on our original post that got me thinking about the strategies Microsoft is employing with Search.

Localisation is a topic we’ve mentioned consistently over the past few years and this was a key opportunity for Live Search to step-up and show itself as a global search engine. Alas it didn’t happen. This isn’t just a case of a few missing homepage images though, nearly all of the Olympic Instant Answers (medal tables, athlete profiles, stats on athlete searches from XRank, etc) are entirely US only. Note that some markets do have limited Olympics features, GB has medal tables for instance. For comparisons, Google appears to be running its features across all markets.

Today’s USA homepage image features Michael Phelps, which was up almost immediately after his win last night, showing just how relevant Live Search can be. (Good job Venkat!)

One other region has featured Olympics imagery so far, and that has been China, with the Bird’s Nest stadium showing throughout the competition. The fact that homepage imagery is showing in another market reinforces that this is not down to technological limitations, but is a business decision.

Who makes the decision to focus on 300million users, when you have another 6.4 billion in markets around the world?

Search, guesstimated value at $1billion for 1% of search queries, is an extremely lucrative market.  If the decision to deploy key features is down to insufficient resources, namely people to do the translations and update the content, then you have to question intent and desire to succeed.

On a side note, Steve Clayton discusses assumptions with regards to product launch and localisation, based on some recent IM stats. Broadband penetration isn’t an issue in this regards, Search is a platform independent, device independent, connection independent, browser independent service. No excuses here I’m afraid.

Incidentally, the Michael Phelps adorned page has a link to the latest Olympics news coverage on Live Search. Here’s the page while I was writing my post. In my mind this shows just how far Live Search still has to go for relevance.

(Note: I use both Live Search and Google in day to day use.)

Just thought I’d do a little promotion for one of our old friends, Steven Sinofsky, who is now blogging with John DeVaan over at Engineering Windows 7 (or e7 for short). There’s a welcome post up already, which leaves you in no doubt as to their intentions for the blog.

“We strongly believe that success for Windows 7 includes an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how we balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows. We promise and will deliver such a dialog with this blog.”

Steven you already started off by setting expectations too high, and inevitably you will now disappoint. Maybe someone could be open, honest and two-way about Ultimate Extras though while you’re at it – you know, that small little thing we all paid $100 for.

“In leading up to this blog we have seen a lot of discussion in blogs about what Microsoft might be trying to accomplish by maintaining a little bit more control over the communication around Windows 7 (some might say that this is a significant understatement).”

…and Windows Live too. See Long Zheng. I’d go out on a limb here and say this was approved disclosure.

“Our intent is to post “regularly”. We’ll watch the comments and we will definitely participate both in comments and potentially in follow-up posts as required.”

Why the quotemarks? Ohh, that’s right, its going to be a press-release style, information posted when approved by PR type of blog. Maybe just move the blog to MS Presspass to make it easier for those mainstream journalists to find and quote?

“We will make sure that members of the Windows 7 development team represent themselves as such as well.”

So the Disclosure Director is now tasked with beating employees into commenting on the blog. Oh fun times in Redmond for the next 2 years!

Community vehicle, no. PR vehicle, most likely. PR is good, just don’t pretend this blog is something it is not going to be. Full credit goes to the real community efforts.

PS: Steven, if you want some more stickers just let us know. Maybe throw us a link in your sidebar?

With all the fuss in recent weeks about Apple’s dismal failure with MobileMe, in particular around providing a stable and reliable service, its interesting to see that today Google is having issues also. With Gmail down, Twitter is on fire as bloggers start complaining about their lack of email access. It’s also worth remembering that 3 weeks ago Amazon experienced some significant downtime in its S3 storage service, used by a number of Web 2.0 companies for image hosting.

Without wishing to tempt fate, the stalwarts of internet communications, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft have all done exceptionally well in recent years with their IM and email services. Looking back to the late 1990’s there were issues seemingly ever month or two, but now with their vast datacenters and experience, all three of the above have services that are much more reliable. However they too still experience issues occasionally, Hotmail had one earlier this year, which makes me wonder how quickly the uptake of services like Live Mesh will be.

With people now wanting to move their business applications and data storage to the internet, 100% availability is the only uptime that users and companies will accept. If you can’t search your email for that critical file when you need it, you’re potentially another dissatisfied customer.  The question is whether anybody can deliver this, and if not, how much downtime will users tolerate - is three nines really attainable? Is it really affordable?

While the issue of data security is always going to be the biggest priority, internet companies are going to need to do much better in order to match the desktop experience. By the looks of things, cloud services still have a way to go yet.

Mary Jo Foley got a great tip last week concerning the possible Live Search rebrand we’ve talked about since this time last year. While the Codename Rome update still went ahead last September, the possible name change was put on hold.

Fast forward one year and Microsoft has failed to acquire Yahoo, and with Live Search Cashback just starting to take off its too early to call it a successful initiative. Does Microsoft want to speed things up, and would a rebrand necessarily achieve this? Kip looked at the branding of Microsoft search several times already, and what’s clear is that while marketing improvements are needed, the product itself still has a way to go, especially in terms of relevance.

While Mary Jo talks about three possible names and her research on them, one possible jumped out straight away to me: Kumo. Apparently meaning either “cloud” or “spider” in Japanese, it wasn’t the literal meaning that got my attention. The giveaway was that the registrar for Kumo.com is CSC Corporate Domains, a company Microsoft has been using increasingly over the past year to pre-register its upcoming product names. Remember that whois I linked in our first post on Windows Live FrameIt? Yes you guessed it, CSC Corporate Domains.

If you spend 20minutes researching further, you’ll see that nearly all major top level domains (TLDs) have been registered or changed owners since March 2008, including .fr, .es, .se, and .co.jp. All of them to anonymous registrants hiding behind the registrars.

The caveat I’ll insert here is that CSC Corporate Domains is used by many corporations to acquire domain names, so it could be any company for any product. However the speed and thoroughness of the acquisitions suggests its not just a small Web 2.0 startup that is looking to launch a product in this space. So if its not Microsoft that is relaunching Live Search as Kumo, then somebody else sure wants to keep their upcoming product secret. But that would be one hell of a coincidence.

After our original post on MobileMe we came in for some criticism for our rather pro-Apple attitude. Our initial thoughts were that Apple had shown a compelling set of products, that showed some nice design touches and boasted strong integration with their hardware, in particular the iPhone.

Well today the MobileMe service is finally stable enough for us to have a play with, so we took another look at Apple’s offerings.  The problems that Apple have had over the last few days with the launch of MobileMe has shown that its not easy building a software + services offering, no matter how big a company you are. In that sense it makes what Microsoft is attempting to achieve with Live Mesh even more impressive, with not just the consumer offering but the entire platform scenario as well.

Signup

The first thing you’ll notice when visiting me.com using Internet Explorer is the Anti-IE7 popup. In fact you can’t help but notice it as it takes over the entire screen, and to continue you must confess to your stupidity in using a Microsoft product. I wonder what they do to Zune users…

MobileMe is not a free product, it comes in at $99 or just under £50 . While there is an initial trial period of 60 days, you’ll still need to provide a credit card on signup in order to give it a try, though there is no billing until after the trial. Overall registration is pretty painless, except for Apple insisting that you give them a phone number.

Upon logging into MobileMe for the first time, users are greeted with a first run video. Unsurprisingly it uses Quicktime, which as I don’t have installed, I therefore can’t comment on the content delivered.

Mail & Contacts

The mail service itself is fairly standard, images in incoming HTML emails are blocked until  allowed and there are vacation reply, email forwarding and POP3 checking options built in. There’s no rich text editor for emails, nor is spell checking performed as you type in IE7, therefore remember to hit the spell check button before sending.

Email attachments are limited to 20MB, however Apple have decided to grey out the screen during this upload and prevent the user from doing anything else. This is the only place in MobileMe where Apple adopts this particular approach, but be warned that on a slow upload you could be stuck doing nothing for a while.

The inbox has a few nice touches. You can preview the first few words of the email and there is a Quick Reply button to save loading up the full email editor. Alas this feature wasn’t working 100% when I tried it.

I don’t really have much to say for contacts, except that compared to Windows Live, the ability to add a photo to a contact was nice. Note to Apple, please set the default date system to match with the billing currency, there’s nothing worse than entering a birthday and then missing it due to Americanisation. Also if you don’t enter a year, it defaults to 2008. Minor points, but irritating nevertheless.

Calendar

The key strength here is the synchronisation between MobileMe and the iPhone/iPod Touch, giving non-Exchange users a way of backing up to the cloud. The web calendar including a to-do list down the side of the screen, however there’s no iCal subscription support. Users can enable a special Birthdays calendar for their contacts, which for those who aren’t using a social networking site is a nice addition.

Gallery

Functionality is basic but the front-end for public viewing is gorgeous due to the small touches, for example the reflection applied below each of the photos. Check out my demo album to see for yourself.

Options include allowing the public uploading of photos, the downloading of the entire album in a zip file and the adding of photos via email or iPhone. These choices can be made on a per album basis, meaning that privacy can be maintained where appropriate.

While the front-end UI is nice, its difficult to see the current web generation migrating from Facebook/My Space due to the loss of automatic public notifications. Facebook Application anybody?

iDisk

Offering 20GB of online storage, iDisk is Apple’s equivalent of Windows Live Skydrive and Foldershare. Users can upload files through the browser, or alternatively install iTunes and map the drive onto the PC or Mac. With iTunes now being Apple’s main route onto the PC, its no surprise to see the MobileMe aspects being bundled in with the media player, but that brings its own set of problems.

Files can be shared publicly if desired, or kept private as a backup of your device(s). For those who want to backup large files and who aren’t using Live Mesh, the maximum file size is 1GB, compared to Skydrive’s existing 50MB limit. Again Apple try to excel with the small touches, and have built a compress option into the website.

Conclusion

Overall, MobileMe looks nice though lacks functionality in some areas. My impressions were that it was more along the lines of a v1 product, which given Apple has been running .Mac for years seems somewhat surprising. The strong integration with iPhone and iPod Touch will definitely help convert some users, however I can’t see people switching email providers from Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail. The same is true for converting from Facebook or Flickr for image hosting. The cross-Apple scenarios will probably fare well, in particular contacts and calendar. As for iDisk, unless you need the backup functionality for your Mac, you’re probably better off sticking with Windows Live Skydrive and then moving to Live Mesh if you haven’t done so already.

Overall the page rendering had a slight lag, which given the low usage (<5 contacts, <5 email in the inbox etc) is worrying for the heavy users. Performance with Firefox was considerably better than Internet Explorer, This may just be down to Apple getting the service going after its shaky start, only time will tell.

Given the free alternatives available its not worth considering at $99 if you aren’t an iPhone/iPod Touch user. If you are though, definitely give it a try.

With today being the iPhone 2.0 launch, there’s a lot of chat about the new Applications Store and Apple touting the 500 third party applications available initially. Ina Fried already questioned Microsoft about how this compares to Windows Mobile, with the response being that “Microsoft has nearly 18,000” applications” and the implication that this is just the Apple Reality Distortion Field at work. I’m not convinced however.

For starters Apple has a much improved experience, from finding the applications, paying and then through to downloading and installation. Apple offers one main store that is integrated into the devices themselves, with payment made easy via the regular iTunes account. Compare this to Windows Mobile users who typically have to find the programs via a search engine, see if it meets their requirements and and then pay the developer direct.

In addition, a large number of the applications offered now in the Apple store are “official” and by that I mean the developers of the service are the ones who made the iPhone app. Comparing to Windows Mobile, this isn’t always the case. Facebook, MySpace or Ebay developed applications? No such luck. Even Blackberry devices have native applications support from some of these services, which begs the question why is Windows Mobile is being omitted. (Aside, where is the Zune Windows Mobile application for controlling your PC playlist or Media Center application?) Windows Mobile 7 has a lot of catching up to do with the iPhone, and not just in the UI, browsing and attractive hardware arena that are the most obvious improvements Apple has pushed.

Ina also picked up that Microsoft are offering no iPhone applications for their products, and in her interview they downplayed any knowledge of these being in development. Given Activesync has already been licensed, I’d be surprised to see no official applications coming out this year. The Live Search Windows Mobile application is extremely good, why not give the benefits to iPhone users too? After all, Ray Ozzie has a Mesh application for Mac being developed, so offering an iPhone application isn’t such a large leap. With forecast sales of 10million in 2008, it won’t be long until it the iPhone catches up to the 20million Windows Mobile are predicting – with mobile usage rapidly increasing why drive these users away from using other Microsoft products and services such as Windows Live.

In case you missed it, Google released a new toy into beta today, called Lively.  In a nod to Software + Services, you download and install an app in Windows, and then log in to Lively.  Here’s a description of what happens next from Google Blogoscoped:

Once you logged into a room, you can start customizing your avatar. First you can pick from a base type – like male, female or animal – and then you can fine-tune your hair, skin color, eyes and more. You’ll then see yourself surrounded by other avatars, and there’s background music and lots of laughing, grunting and other noises. The graphic has a lighthearted cartoon touch, reminiscent of something like a Lucasarts 3D game. When you talk by using the chat box at the bottom, your words appear as speech bubble above your character.

Lively exists in “rooms” you create, which according to Google’s Niniane Wang, express your personality:

If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator’s interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose. You can also express your own personality by customizing your avatar’s look, showing people who you are without having to say a word. Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions.

(screenshot from Google Blogoscoped)

Another 3D product, to probably their great dismay, was announced (well announced again) on the same day as Lively.  Vivaty, a new company with a new product, Scenes.  This one works with Facebook and AIM, currently:

So what does this all have to do with Windows Live?  Well our friend Jamie Thomson wondered the same thing.  Now we really admire Jamie’s passion about Windows Live, but sometimes his blog posts are long on wishful thinking and short on fact.  This time, however, he lays out a compelling case for Windows Live working on some 3D magic of their own.  His synopsis:

1. In Fall (I call it Autumn) 2007 a Microsoft exec said to expect big things in about a year or so.
2. There's a big Virtual Earth release coming up in fall 2008 so says a Virtual Earth evangelist.
3. Someone involved with building 3D models in Virtual Earth has come out and said that Microsoft are building a virtual world using Virtual Earth.

(links added from the original blog post)

In addition, if you watch the Channel 9 video that Sunshine posted here this morning, Mark Brown (hey the same VE Evangelist that said there’s a big release coming this fall – oooh the plot thickens!) interviews two guys who work on the UltraCam, and they are all about separating the plant material from buildings, etc., and also capturing perspective views of buildings.  If you listen closely to the video, you’ll begin to understand that much of what appears in Live Maps 3D is being captured and created (and planned for from the get-go) in the camera and the software.

And of course there’s the whole 3DVia piece, where all kinds of 3D objects can be constructed and included in Live Maps 3D.

+++

UPDATE:  Was just reminded of the Microsoft acquisition of Caligari, who already have a 3D rendering product out – TrueSpace:

Will we be seeing something from these guys soon?

+++

When Live Maps 3d was first demoed, it included advertising in the form of billboards that were inserted into scenes.  Those quickly disappeared, but the technology to add to the 3D scenes (and the concept of having advertising within Live Maps 3D) has been around since the beginning.  Again, here’s Matt Baron, the 3DVia guy quoted above:

First they are building the real world, and step by step they are coming closer to a fully immersive environment.

While both Lively and Vivaty are interesting, especially Lively with the power of Google behind it, neither one of these products seems like much of a step forward from Second Life, which while it took off at first, has kind of lost its edge.  Will a more fully immersive environment, with direct ties to the real world, take the next step in 3D?  While we don’t have any solid information, we think Jamie might just be on to something.

While we stopped writing about the day to day exploits of Microsoft and Yahoo! a bit ago, now that it appears to be coming to an end we can’t help but make a few observations.  When Microsoft first approached Yahoo! about some kind of deal, back in January 2007, the idea of a rapid advance in search share seemed obvious and advantageous.  Since then, Microsoft both wearied of dealing with Yahoo! and probably learned quite a bit about the motivations, and the weaknesses of the company it pursued.  From the moment Microsoft made a public offer for Yahoo!, on February 1 of this year, nothing about the way that Yahoo! responded could have come as much of a surprise to Microsoft.  They’d been witnessing the same kind of action for more than a year behind closed doors.

Make no mistake, finding weaknesses, and then going for the throat, is what Microsoft does best.  As an evil empire, they’re damn good at what they do.

So take a look at what’s transpired since February.  Yahoo! is a shambles.  Microsoft has begun to fire the first volleys in its assault on “the ten blue lines”, with a stated purpose of “disrupting” in search.  Google finds itself, while decidedly in a strengthened position, all of a sudden with the eyes of the Department of Justice upon them.

Jerry Yang and David Filo were shocked when Microsoft pulled back from the table, but was it an admission of defeat by Microsoft, or a calculated move to “disrupt” in a lot more ways than just rolling out a cashback program?  Did Microsoft lead Yahoo! up to the precipice and then give them a swift kick in the behind?  Microsoft walked away from the deal, and truthfully if anything it was a relief to shareholders, partners, and employees.  They came out of it with no damage done.  If they could have pulled off a deal that made sense, at a price that made sense, they would have done so.  By pulling out, they may have dealt a fatal blow to Yahoo!, set Google up for a monopoly battle that might, with any luck, get ugly quickly, and certainly have left the search game with more uncertainty (and more opportunity for Microsoft) than there was before the offer was made.

Over and over, word from within Microsoft is that “we’re in search for the long haul”, and “this game is just beginning”.  Microsoft isn’t going to win in search this year, or next.  Beating Yahoo! down isn’t going to guarantee Microsoft anything, and may indeed make Google even more powerful than before.  But it’s a shot, an opening that wasn’t there before.  Will the disruption they’ve caused by pursuing, and then spurning Yahoo! reveal some chinks in the Google armor?  Will Google be ready to withstand an assault by the DOJ, with Microsoft pulling every string they have available behind the scenes to spur them on? Expect Microsoft to be more than ready to exploit every weakness, to get down and dirty, to pull out its formidable bag of tricks.  Microsoft didn’t lose much by not buying Yahoo!, but what did they gain?  Time will tell.