September 2008 - OurView: The Opinion Blog

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.