Plenty of coverage of Microsoft’s new Windows Live services today:
- Live from San Francisco: Bill Gates on Next-Gen Software
- Gates: We’re entering ‘live era’ of software
- Microsoft ‘Live’: ‘Hailstorm’ Take 2
- Microsoft to enter online services market
The early Windows Live beta is here and more MS live services (also beta) are listed here including Windows Live Search beta-mobile (not yet available) and the Windows Live Favorites beta. I’m sure more services are coming. (-:
We can save discussion on the entire project for another time but what is interesting (IMHO) is that Windows Live beta (not available for Firefox by the way) looks, acts, and feels just like Microsoft’s nearly year old “incubation experiment” Start.com (it works with Firefox) personalized portal that we’ve been posting about for some time.
Officially, this is what Microsoft has to say about Start.com, “[The] site is not an officially supported site. it is an incubation experiment and doesn’t represent any particular strategy or policy.”
Well, it should look and feel similar. Why?
In fact, the Live.com Blog points out that the same development team has been working on both projects. Well, it looks like the incubator has been turned off and we now know something about a particular strategy. Btw, the Live.com Blog also explains how you can move some of your Start.com feeds to Live.com.
Btw, the search portion of Live.com includes inline answers and spelling correction. Unlike Start.com it also offers access to Hotmail and the new Windows Live mail service (not yet available). The mail service will offer 2GB of space. Surprised? Not!
Postscript: It appears that the MSN Home Page Beta that I blogged about a few months ago (then went away) and offers many personalization features is back online (IE only). Here’s a screen cap taken at about 9:30 PST.
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