Windows Live is dead

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

>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.

Microsoft's new venture 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.

@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.

WTF was it anyway?

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.

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.