Windows Live Takes Aim At Popular Social Networking Sites
Microsoft’s next release of Windows Live online services will integrate e-mail, instant messaging, photos and Web applications from other companies into a single platform, the company announced on Wednesday.
With its widely used e-mail and messaging services, Microsoft aims to position Windows Live as the hub for a growing number of Internet applications and incorporate new features similar to those found on popular social networks.
With the move, Microsoft will begin competing with social networking sites Facebook and News Corp’s MySpace, which recently started to open their fast-growing websites to outside software developers.
Windows Live’s new service will feature a main profile page that updates users to their friends’ activities within Windows Live and on more than 50 outside Web services including Yahoo Inc’s Flickr photo site and career-oriented social networking site LinkedIn.
Charlene Li, founder of consulting company Altimeter Group, called it “a race to see who will work better and faster with everyone else."
Web users are overrun with accounts at multiple Internet sites, each requiring a password and each with a different set of friends, Microsoft said. The new services aims to simplify the Web lives of its users who go to Microsoft’s Windows Live e-mail or instant messaging accounts.
Microsoft plans to use Windows Live to wrestle away online advertising revenue from Google Inc, which has used its dominant search engine to expand into e-mail, online word processing and other businesses that compete directly with Microsoft.
The new Windows Live services features a revamped e-mail, calendar and a new photo application. It will first be made available in the United States over the coming weeks and then released in 54 countries by early next year.
They company said it aims to fill in the seams between its different Web services to create a unified experience.
As a model for tying together a loose network of Web services, Brian Hall, general manager of Windows Live, pointed to Microsoft’s Outlook application, which brought together e-mail, calendar and contacts programs into a single integrated software suite.
“The latest Windows Live release is focused on creating a more polished user experience, which, in the past, may have been sacrificed in order to get new programs out quicker,” Hall added.
The new release boasts several other new services including an online movie maker program, a "groups" service that allows a group of users to create a joint calendar, share photos and documents or chat together online. Microsoft also plans to increase the size of its free storage service to 25 gigabytes from 20 GB.
With more than 460 million Windows Live users, analysts said the goal for the company is to keep that audience in front of the company’s websites for as long as possible and to prevent defection to other Web destinations.
But David Card, research director at Forrester, said he doesn’t think Microsoft is going to steal a whole lot of eyeballs from Facebook or MySpace.
Many of Facebook’s 120 million active users rely on its mail and chat applications to communicate with friends instead of traditional e-mail and messaging services offered by Microsoft and Yahoo.
But analysts say Microsoft and Facebook are pursuing the same strategy from different sides and areas of strengths. Microsoft paid $240 million last year for a 1.6 percent stake in privately held Facebook.
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