Windows Live looks good. Somehow they got the design just right. Consumers looking to communicate with others and manage their lives have options from 2 fronts:
1. Email / Chat services such as Hotmail, Yahoo, and Google that have been adding more and more social functions so that you can do things with your Contact List.
2. Social sites such as Facebook that have added more and more direct communication functions such as Email and Chat.
Microsoft obviously has a tremendous amount of leverage (the 90% of computer owners who are Windows users) in attempting to tie your Internal World with your Outreaching to others. Yet, it stumbles. Despite the nice layout, the Live experience suffers from Things That Don't Work, Continued Confusion About Names and Relations to Other MS Products, and from insufficient integration with the Rest of the Web.
I will examine the new version of Hotmail / Live over the next week.
Here is the first, Thing that Doesn't Work: the new Calendar's Birthday calendar. It is supposed to populate itself with the dates of your Contact's birthdays. That's a great idea. It merges one product (a Calendar) with info pulled from an existing source (a Contact List). It's one of the things that only a big software company like MS could offer. And yet it's one of the things that only MS would botch: it doesn't work. Go ahead and enter birth dates for any of your contacts. They won't show up in the Birthday Calendar. :(
More to follow....
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