

Windows Live is dead - smacktoward
http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2012/05/windows-live-is-dead/

======
Shenglong
Microsoft has never really done a very good job explaining their approach to
the layperson. In fact, the first time I saw "Windows Live" was when my MSN
Messenger suddenly disappeared, and was replaced with "Windows Live
Messenger". At that age, I was a huge MSN advocate, but after some confusion
with version numbers, updates, plugins (Plus!), and features, I just dropped
the program altogether. It wasn't really a conscious decision. It just wasn't
worth using anymore.

To be fair, I do believe that there should be _some_ sort of connection
between a company's products, but trying to make them all fit a "vision" is
very limiting, and often comes across as forced. Do I like being able to use
my gmail to sign into all Google services? Yes. Do I care if my YouTube page
shares the same design as my GMail page? Not at all.

In fact, the product environment is flooded with terrible integration. Here
are some examples:

\- Apple's iPhone is a wonderful product (and I use it), but having it
integrate with iTunes is a horrible idea. My iTunes takes longer than my
Windows Media Player to start up (about 6 times longer) and I honestly don't
find it very intuitive at all. Syncing makes very little sense until you're
used to it, and I still don't know where my old text messages are saved.

\- Windows 7 Phone is actually a pretty cool concept in my opinion. In fact,
MSFT actually showed off a prototype at a conference I helped organize. For
the longest time, I couldn't figure out (not that I tried to) whether "Windows
7 Phone" was a phone, an operating system, or both.

\- Google Talk and Google+ integration is probably the most annoying one. I
joined the HN Google+ group, and since then, thousands of people have added me
to some circle or another. In the beginning, I actually took the time to add
them back into my "HN Circle". Unfortunately, random strangers then started
popping up in my GChat, and I spent days setting everyone not to show. Since
then, I haven't added anyone to G+, and I've stopped using it altogether out
of frustration.

I'm sure there are ways around some of the things I mentioned, but the driving
point is that it wasn't obvious. Companies need to stop ruining their awesome
products with their shitty products.

~~~
mtgx
I generally dislike the direction of the latest few versions of Windows Live
Messenger. It has gotten more confusing and bloated over the past 3 years.

~~~
narrator
It seems like Microsoft can't just leave a product alone and move on to the
next thing. They have to keep milking the same app brand for all its worth
adding more and more features to the point of absurdity.

~~~
rprospero
To be fair, that's exactly what they did with IE6

------
tjoff
Funny, considering that we have something equivalent today: Google Play.

I can't even begin to comprehend how they renamed "Market" to "Play Store" and
they have absolutely _nothing_ to offer worth the name _Play_ , to the
consumers it is just as confusing as "Live" was/is.

A lot of people have no idea where their market have gone and they just can't
find the Play Store, or more importantly - they have no idea why they should
look for something such as the Play Store and when they see it they won't
recognize it as something they want, just another form of adware. Just as
Live, people knew they wanted MSN Messenger, at least microsoft kept the name
Messenger so people could find it.

~~~
Gustomaximus
I also wondered about the "Play" rename. I assumed it happened because they
have such a strong priority coming from above on movies/music this became the
central thinking. And apps/books became less relevant.

~~~
fpgeek
I don't think Play was meant to exclude apps so much as recognize that the
apps that sell the most tend to be games (or at least it looked that way the
last time I compared the iOS and Android leader-boards).

Books, on the other hand... it's clear no one was thinking about them (but
that's par for the course, I'd say).

~~~
gurkendoktor
Wow - last time I checked the iOS App Store, Pages and GoodReader were
leading. You are right, it's mostly games now.

Conversely, the (German) Mac App Store is has almost _no_ games in the
bestseller lists.

Now I'm really curious about Windows 8...

------
yason
To quote: _The biggest problem Microsoft has, I think, is that there is
nothing they’re working on these days that makes a person like me look at them
and think “damn, I wish I was working in their ecosystem.”_

This. This is it. You can't qualify it or put in more concrete words what it
is that's missing, but there's something missing. Much like Nokia has been
kind of missing out for a decade, and definitely ever since iPhone came.

The common pattern with companies that are missing out is that they're lured
into it by their heydays. They used to be really successful and many still
are, despite this, but there's _that something_ missing, everyone can sense
it, and it's only a matter of time when the void bursts in and the stakes of
reinventing themselves go all-or-nothing.

With Nokia that is happening pretty much as I'm writing. Microsoft's ship is
bigger and their product line is more versatile, so it'll be many parts going
under at different pace while some parts might still be raising up.

~~~
facorreia
I find the Azure platform very compelling and C# a very productive language.
The upcoming enhanced support for asynchronous programming in C# 5 is
something I wish JavaScript would have for Node.js programming.

~~~
yason
I'm quite sure those aren't the only things at Microsoft that are compelling
and productive. However, being good doesn't preclude being simultaneously on a
downward slope. You have to be riding on the right wave, or better yet
creating the right wave yourself, to succeed. And I see Microsoft floating
steadily on their surfboard while several waves simply pass by.

------
tsurantino
It's really not a question of Microsoft's specific branding strategy but an
indication of how opposed Microsoft's big, bloated bureaucratic culture to the
modern, fast, lean technological era we are proceeding in.

One thing that really upsets me and frustrates me more and more is how
intensely complicated and centralized the environment is for Microsoft. You
have this version, that version this technology, that technology clients and
communication softwares that support this and that. I get it Microsoft, you're
huge.

But because it's so huge it makes it so much more difficult to penetrate.
Thus, when other companies make swift decisions to penetrate specific parts of
their market and chip away at their usage or establish new markets which
undercut Microsoft's existing market prowess (disruption), Microsoft goes
crazy with these rebranding techniques.

When Microsoft does pursue a new brand (or rebrands an existing service),
they, as per their culture, bloat their initiatives into these big, massive
sweeps. However, these massive sweeps are generally empty, confusing and
deliberately ambiguous because I don't think that Microsoft weighs the
consumer input versus their own internal goals. I don't think they even
bothered with really _empirically_ (via iteration, for example) discovering
what the service was for because, as Microsoft does, they spend months-years
working on these big projects and release them, hoping that people just eat
them like they do Windows.

I think the market context for the way Windows is sold to consumers (big,
sweeping changes) is very different to the rest of their products. Phones, web
products, runtime environments are very substitutable and the resources to
product companies that make these products are becoming more and more
democratized. As such, a company like Microsoft really doesn't have the kind
of stranglehold that it does. That's why things like Live suck and don't make
sense. Microsoft is trying to push this top-down because they think we don't
know what we want.

Bottom line: I think Steve Ballmer can take a really good cue from Eric Ries
on why lean startups work well and disrupt the way they do.

------
diminish
There must be a guy in Microsoft, converting all product names to Windows
_generic_ , or Microsoft _generic name_. I am sure he is happily sitting
somewhere at Seattle, waiting for acquisitions to rename them too, and I am
sure he wears cool stuff and talks cool stuff. After Google Play, I suspect a
similar guy now works for Google.

------
barkingllama
The author suggests that Google has a unified product vision; I'd love to hear
what it is. To me, Google has been all over the place in the last 5 years.

~~~
fromhet
I believe it's about information flowing free and avaliable for everyone, apps
running in browsers instead of the desktops and to use applications-as-a-
service.

------
nikcub
> there’s no grand vision at the heart of the company’s work anymore, unlike
> competitors such as Apple and Google

The Google part was sarcasm, right?

~~~
gurkendoktor
You are getting downvoted but I scratched my head at that part too. What is
Google's vision?

------
mung
>I hope they get their mojo back. Because we need them, if only to prevent the
future from being an Apple/Google duopoly.

huh?! a) What mojo..? b) yeah because a MS monopoly is really really good.

~~~
smacktoward
Hi, author of the post here.

 _What mojo..?_

This may have been before your time, but believe it or not, at one point (late
'80s through the '90s) Microsoft was _feared_. A standard question VCs would
ask new software startups was "what is your Redmond Strategy?" -- meaning
"what will you do if/when Microsoft decides your market segment is interesting
and decides to take it for themselves?"

 _because a MS monopoly is really really good._

I don't want a Microsoft monopoly to come back -- one of the most liberating
things about the Internet as a platform is how it let you skip the need for a
Redmond Strategy -- but it would be good for everyone who buys/uses tech to
have Microsoft as a healthy competitor on a level playing field. More choices
equals more competition equals more innovation.

------
sparknlaunch12
Microsoft's new venture So.cl <[http://www.so.cl/>](http://www.so.cl/>); has
two log in options - Live and Facebook.

Unless Microsoft are using this as an opportunity to leverage Facebook user
info on the MS platform, the days of Live may be soon over.

~~~
axefrog
so.cl is a research experiment focussing on academics; it's not meant to be a
big new venture.

~~~
89a
Why bother releasing it at all then. It just confuses your customers.

Surely this area would be better tackled by a lean startup.

~~~
truncate
For experiment you need data. Maybe for that.

------
Bootvis
@mmmmbop your comments are autodead but you don't seem to be a spammer. You
can send an e-mail to info@ycombinator.com to restore it.

------
damian2000
WTF was it anyway?

------
89a
Live and .net were both always a branding disasters.

Especially .net, so it's a programming framework but also the new name for
Passport and Messenger, what the fuck were they thinking.

------
recoiledsnake
Microsoft has been hobbled by unable to integrate services with Windows the
way Apple has been doing because of the anti-trust oversight. Hell, the EU
blows a gasket at them bundling the media player! There were some cool things
in it like Live Mesh and the Writer. They couldn't even ship Skydrive with
Windows. Since the oversight ended recently, they're going to integrate things
with Windows 8.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.

~~~
recoiledsnake
I thought we were discussing why Live failed here, not whether the anti-trust
trial was justified or not.

