Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Windows Live and Start.com

Bill Gates announced a new effort at Microsoft called Windows Live.

This site supposedly will be the default start page in IE 7. If this will be the default home page for millions of users, it is definitely a trend worth watching.

If you noticed it looks a lot like MSN's Start.com, there's a good reason for that. Sanaz Ahari posts that the same team that developed Start.com developed Live.com.

After using Windows Live for a little bit, I'm pretty surprised that this is their attempt to compete with My Yahoo, My Google, and My AOL. The initial experience is poor; the site has little or no value until it is customized.

Most users won't bother with the effort of extensive customization. Windows Live needs to provide a great initial experience and be trivially easy to use before it's going to appeal to the mainstream.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Firefox support is coming soon. Please be patient :-)"

Way to go, "launch"

Greg Linden said...

Yeah, I agree. Microsoft should be embarrassed.

Joel Spolsky sums it up: "I don't remember Microsoft ever shipping anything quite this half-baked."