Windows Live finds its feet
Published: 07 Nov 2007 17:31 GMT
…Windows Live Spaces from the Photo Gallery. You might imagine that there will be other photo sites that people are interested in publishing to, and those are the kinds of capabilities we'll look at.
That kind of dovetails into one of the other things I was going to ask. Where is it important for Windows Live to plug into internet services from other companies?
I think you'll see us, at least in Windows Live, focus on helping customers in two areas. One is getting your information from anywhere, and that means that regardless of the service your information is stored on, we want to help you get to that information.
A good example of that would be today in email we're letting you bring together your POP accounts, and aggregate those things into Hotmail.
It would be a nice thing for you to be able to do with photos and with files so that you can get to all that information from one place. That's a place where bringing in other internet services would really help and allow customers to say: "Hey, I have my photos stored in this other place, but I really want to be able to view them and send them around using Windows Live."
Another example is communicating and sharing with people where I think that what we're finding at least is people are on lots of different social networks, and they're using lots of different ways to communicate.
At the same time, they probably have one contact list — it's inconvenient to have two — so a notion where it's easy for you to communicate with different people, regardless of the network they're on.
If the definition of "social-networking site" is a way to discover other people, then we do think Windows Live is a great way to do that
If you think about the evolution that email went through where it used to be you could only communicate with people on your email server, and then it was only people from your service provider, and then it became email addresses are universal — I think we'll see that same trend with a lot of the social-networking work, where for basic communication you'll just be able to find people and send it to them, and you'll want to do that, regardless of the network they're on.
What is your view of where Windows Live fits into the social-networking world? Have you guys kind of resigned yourself to the fact that Windows Live isn't in and of itself going to be a social network?
The thing I think about with social networking is it means a lot of things to a lot of people. Is Flickr a social-networking site? I think it is. It's a way for people to find each other and share things and communicate. It's very focused on photo sharing. Is YouTube a social-networking site? Sort of.
So, if the definition of "social-networking site" is a way to discover other people, then we do think Windows Live is a great way to do that today and, in fact, Messenger is in particular a service where it's super easy to discover other people. It turns out to be very presence-oriented.
One thing you do in your personal life is manage all your information, and manage your life. We think Windows Live is going to do a great job at that.
A second thing you do in your personal life is just stay in touch with people. You want to send someone a Christmas card, you want to know when they've changed their job, but they're not really a friend of yours, they're just on your contact list. I think Windows Live is going to do a great job at that, and already has with the features that we've added in this release.
A third thing you want to do is do sharing and really intimate communication with your friends and your family and these small groups of people, and that's an area I think that nobody has really done — just share with your family or just share with your friends well, and I think that's an area for us to explore.
There was a presentation by one of the people at Microsoft at Georgia Tech that talked a little bit about the future of Messenger. Can you talk a little bit about that? It mentioned things such as interoperability with AOL and Google as being in the works.
I think that the person works on my team, and they were quoted out of context.
We obviously have some work that we're working on with Messenger in terms of the platform and the direction that we're headed, but the things that were quoted and said, they aren't on our roadmap in any kind of public way.
Where are things as far as interoperability with some of the other people?
We have an agreement with Yahoo on interop, and that's about the extent of what we've done. I can't discuss things on other networks, but certainly…
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