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.

Last fall, some of our sources hinted at an upcoming rebranding effort for Live Search, code named “Rome”.  That renaming effort, seemingly thwarted by all the buzz around Yahoo!, never took place (or at least hasn’t so far).  Yet talk continues to swirl around rebranding Live Search, even including some strong hints by Microsoft Online Services President Kevin Johnson, both at Advance08, and again yesterday at SMX Advanced.

Does Live Search need rebranding?  First of all, what is a brand?  Of course a brand is much more than a catchy new name.  A brand is a conversation, the new thinking goes.  More than just a name and a logo, a brand carries emotional attachment.  In a Wikipedia entry on “Brand”, the authors quote Howard Shultz, CEO of Starbucks coffee:

"A great brand raises the bar -- it adds a greater sense of purpose to the experience, whether it's the challenge to do your best in sports and fitness, or the affirmation that the cup of coffee you're drinking really matters."

In a post on Nielsen NetRatings Small Business Professional Center blog, Matt Alderton quotes author Barbara Findley Schenk on brands:

branding is part cosmetic—a name, a logo, and a slogan on your business cards—but more than that, it's a promise that your customers believe in. "If you can't make and keep a promise," she says, "then all the marketing and advertising materials in the world won't work."

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Today, billionaire investor Carl Icahn sent a letter to the Yahoo! Board of Directors, announcing his intentions to force Yahoo! to work out a deal with Microsoft. He announced a slate of candidates who will be up for election at the annual meeting on July 3, and an aggressive plan to acquire enough stock to make sure they would be elected (and then to force a sale to Microsoft). In the letter, Icahn pulled no punches about his intentions:

It is clear to me that the board of directors of Yahoo has acted irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders and Microsoft. It is quite obvious that Microsoft's bid of $33 per share is a superior alternative to Yahoo's prospects on a standalone basis. I am perplexed by the board's actions. It is irresponsible to hide behind management's more than overly optimistic financial forecasts. It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72% premium over Yahoo's closing price of $19.18 on the day before the initial Microsoft offer.

After Microsoft walked away from the deal, Yahoo! stock slid, but not nearly as far as the pre-offer price of $19.18. Clearly Yahoo! investors weren’t ready to walk away. First there were rumblings from large investors about ousting Jerry Yang, and now Icahn has stepped in. While some have said that the Microsoft pull-out was a ploy, there were clear indications that Ballmer had soured on the whole idea, and that the damaged goods Yang was offering was not what Microsoft was looking for.