Surprising as it may seem, Microsoft is pretty darn good at creating iPhone apps. It’s latest entry, Windows Live Messenger, became available as a free download in the iTunes App Store on Monday.

Although the central premise of the app is to stay on top of your Windows Live network and chat with your buddies, the company has added a few additional features sure to please any Live user.

Microsoft has also enabled push notifications, which will alert the user to new IMs when the app is closed. As long as your buddy has connected his or her Live account to other social networking sites, you will be able to see what he or she is sharing on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, among others on the social stream screen which greets users as they load the application.

Hotmail access in-application is also provided (you can see it in the screenshot, its the glowing orange icon in the upper right hand corner), although there is no link provided from the bottom menu. That’s a bit of a shame but definitely could be added in a future release.

Messenger is the fourth iPhone application to be released by Microsoft. The company’s first application was Seadragon Mobile, a Photosynth viewer released in December 2008. This was followed by Microsoft’s Bing search app in March, and then Tag, a reader for its proprietary QR code-like offering in May.

I am fairly impressed with the app, and it seems like with each one coming out of Microsoft, the company gets better and better. I’m now wondering if the folks they have developing these should be giving some advice to the rest of the software developers at Redmond on how to design functional apps without the clutter…

That’s certainly the situation with the new “Wave 3″ upgrades to the company’s Windows Live services. They’ve been public knowledge since at least early this year. Then there was an official announcement three weeks ago. And today the company has announced that the first of the new services–Wave 1 of Wave 3, I guess–are rolling out to everyone over the next twenty-four hours. With more to come.

The new items include updates to Windows Live’s Home, Events, Spaces, and SkyDrive, and new services including Groups, Photos, and Profile. Hotmail received a recent upgrade and subsequent tweaks based on user feedback, and an additional referesh is promised for next year. Desktop Windows Live apps such as Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, and the Writer blogging tool were already in public beta before today’s rollout. Meanwhile, Windows Live Search underwent some cosmetic changes a few months ago and there’s a rumor it may change its name to Kumo. And Microsoft keeps talking about other items to come, but doesn’t say what they are. I’m beginning to get a headache just thinking about all this…

Microsoft says that one key goal is to impose some consistency on all of Windows Live’s many services–through, for instance, a toolbar that stays at the top no matter where you are. It’s a noble goal–and it’s hard to gauge its success at the moment, since some new Live services are indeed live, and others aren’t.

Like I said, Google tends to just announce things when they’re available. It also doesn’t do package announcements of multiple services, nor does it try to tie everything together with an umbrella moniker a la Windows Live. Stuff is ready when it’s ready, and there’s no particular consistency of branding–the Google world has room for everything from Google Apps to Gmail to Picasa to YouTube. And yet Google has done a much better job than Microsoft historically of releasing disparate services that have some overarching philosophies about look, feel, and functionality.

Anyhow, Windows Live is much too ambitious and far-flung for me to try and review it all in one place. So I’m going to look at its components separately–starting very soon…

That’s mostly because Microsoft is using the new version of Windows Live–which will become available in drips and drabs over the coming weeks and months–to turn the 460 million folks who use one or more Live services into something resembling a social network. It’s not meant to take on Facebook head-to-head: It’s still less of a social network and more of a suite of disparate services and apps that happen to have Facebook-like features in some cases. Starting with the new Windows Live homepage, which will sport a very Facebookian feed of your friends’ activities:

One key difference between Microsoft’s feed and Facebook’s: Microsoft has signed up scads of third parties, and yor activities at them can show up in your Windows Live feed. It’s truly an all-star roster: Amazon, Digg, LiveJournal, Pandora, PhotoBucket, Twitter, SmugMug, StumbleUpon, WordPress, Yelp, and many more, including more than a few international ones unfamiliar to me (Hyves? Jeeran?).

If this sounds a little like Facebook’s controversial Beacon advertising feature, which had people discovering that things they’d done elsewhere on the Web were showing up in their Facebook feeds without their knowledge, don’t stress: Microsoft says that all this cross-service social networking will be opt-in. Your activities won’t show up on Windows Live unless you ask for them to be there.

I’m still left with some overarching questions about the new Windows Live. Such as…

Do people want an all-encompassing set of Web services? More than any other set of services I can think of, Live does its best to do everything under the sun; it’s sheer comprehensiveness is clearly a major selling point. Bt one of the niftiest things about the Web is just how easy it is to pick and choose your tools. Me, I use Google’s Gmail, AOL’s AIM instant-messaging network (but via iChat and Meebo, not the AIM client), Yahoo’s Flickr photo sharing, and Apple’s Mobile Me calendar–four services, four different providers.

How well-integrated will the services be? The most alluring thing Microsoft could do to convince me to abandon services I’m using for Live equivalents would be to make its services and applications truly seamless and obsessively consistent in look and feel–at least as much so as, say, its own Microsoft Office apps. From what I’ve seen so far, the company hasn’t done this. (See images below.)

Is it too late get a critical mass of social networking fans onto Live? There’s a good idea at the core of Live’s new social features: Your e-mail and IM contacts form a network of friends, family, and colleagues, and you’re probably interested in what they’re up to. But no social network matters unless you’ve got a critical mass of buddies there to communicate with. At the moment, I have very few pals who hang out on Live. And unless its new features turn out to be so spellbinding that there’s a land rush like the one that prompted so many folks to head to Facebook over the past year or two, Live may remain a place with lots of social networking features but few people to network with. (For me, I mean–and yes, I know that with half a billion people on Live, chances are that I know more people there than I think.)

Remind me again what Windows Live has to do with Windows? It shares its name, but little else: In fact, Microsoft has worked commendably hard to make most of Live platform-agnostic. (It doesn’t require Windows or IE, and a splashy photo slideshow feature is the only aspect that demands you use a Microsoft app you may not already have, the Silverlight plug-in.) I’m still convinced that the future of Windows involves a hybrid approach with an OS and Web services that are so tightly integrated that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. Windows+Windows Live is not this combination.

I’ll have more to say about the new Windows Live as its various components roll out. For now, how about a few screenshots?

I think that’s potentially a very encouraging sign about Microsoft’s priorities for W7. Operating systems shouldn’t be about e-mail or photo tweaking or movie making–they should be about being a fast, reliable, and intuitive platform for all of those applications and thousands more. By insisting on making those programs part of earlier versions of Windows, Microsoft hobbled both the apps and the OS in multiple ways:

–There’s no way that applications that move at the speed of OS development can keep up with the rest of the world. Windows XP shipped in 2001; how could a photo app tied to it compete with services like Flickr that arrived years later, even if it received updates?

–Applications bundled with operating systems are destined for mediocrity–nobody pays for them, or even chooses to use them. They’re defaults–at best, they get good enough to be good enough. And then they stagnate.

–Bundled apps are just a distraction. There’s so much fundamental stuff that Windows could do better on every front, from performance to security to usability; why lard up the OS with apps that are clearly optional and which have strong third-party rivals?

I don’t think Microsoft would nod its corporate head in agreement with all of the points above, but some of the things it told Ina about its decision aren’t wildly different in terms of the bottom line. That’s a striking reversal from marketing for Windows XP and Vista, both of which often played up the bundled applications that came with the OS. Here, for instance, is the XP ad with Madonna’s “Ray of Light”:

It’s also strikingly different than Apple’s OS-application strategy. It too makes an operating system and creative applications, but OS X and iLife only get bundled together on a new Mac. iLife will only live as long as it’s compelling enough to get real people excited enough to pay real money for it. Otherwise, they’re standalone products that must be purchased separately. Good for OS X; good for iLife; good, ultimately, for Mac users.

I think Microsoft could go way further with this basic idea: Should it be a given that Windows comes with Windows Media Player or even Internet Explorer? Maybe Paint should be retired after 23 years? (That’s apparently not going to happen–actually, it’s apparently getting a major makeover, with the Office 2007 Ribbon interface and multi-touch support.) But losing some apps is a good start–and I think that Windows Mail, Photo Gallery, and Movie Maker all stand a better chance of being really competitive if they stand on their own and only get used by people who make an effort to find, download, and explore them.

]]> http://technologizer.com/2008/09/22/no-e-mail-photo-editing-and-movie-editing-in-windows-7-what-a-good-idea/feed/ 6 Harry McCracken