To those of you new to our blog, let me first say welcome! And for those of you who’ve been here before, it’s great to meet you. I’m Chris Jones and I lead the program management team for Windows Live. We’re hard at work on the next major release of Windows Live, and in the coming weeks and months we will be updating this blog with more details about the new features and design goals of our products.

Before we get to the future of Windows Live, I’d like to cover where we’ve been and where we are today. Our goal with Windows Live is to build a suite of software and services that help you get to your information from any device and keep up with the people you care about, using a variety of services. We recognized from the start that this journey would take several years to complete, and would require coordination across our products in a new way to bring them all together. As a result, we decided to plan and release updates to Windows Live in waves. A wave generally spans anywhere from a few months to more than a year and is a coordinated release of web-based services, PC software, and mobile experiences. Of course we regularly update our products throughout each wave, so you’ll often see new features show up, not just at the end of a wave.

Our first wave, completed in 2006, focused on bringing together several existing online services including Hotmail, Messenger, and Spaces – into a single Windows Live release.

Our next wave focused on creating a suite of PC software to enhance the Windows and Windows Mobile experiences, designed to work best when connected to our suite of web-based services. We brought the Photo Gallery and Mail applications for your PC into the Windows Live family and created a new blogging tool called Windows Live Writer, all part of a desktop suite. We also introduced a number of new web services including Events, SkyDrive, Calendar, and Family Safety. We released updates to Hotmail, Messenger, and Spaces and brought all of our web services together with a common header (a set of links at the top of the page) and a new home page (http://home.live.com). And finally we introduced Windows Live experiences for mobile phones including downloads for Windows Mobile devices and browser-based services for web-enabled mobile devices. This wave of releases completed in 2007.

We have spent the last year working on our next major wave of releases for Windows Live. This wave is part of our ongoing work to build a great set of communication and sharing experiences that help keep your life in sync. This wave includes significant updates to our software applications for your Windows PC, and in the next few hours, we will release public betas of the latest version of the Windows Live suite of PC applications, including Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Toolbar, and Family Safety. You’ll find new features across the products and most notably, Windows Live Messenger has been almost entirely redesigned. I’m sure many of you will have questions, and, over the coming weeks, we’ll have individuals from the engineering team share more about what we have built and why we made the investments we made. Our intent is to post regularly to this blog, and if there are topics you think we should cover, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail at chris.jones@microsoft.com.

One thing we know will be important to all of you will be the “feedback loop” - where you can offer suggestions and we take those suggestions and improve our products. We are avid users of Windows Live ourselves and we’re always combing blogs, newsgroups, and articles that are highlighting feedback and usage of Windows Live. We’ve enabled comments on these posts and our plan is to read and treat everything as input into our designs. We will also participate in the comments, but we can’t answer every single request. In addition to this blog, our products are all part of the Customer Experience Improvement Program, an anonymous, opt-in, and private mechanism whereby we can learn about how customers really use our products. We pay very close attention to this data and will talk more about it in posts in the future. You can help by opting in to share this information with us.

With that, I’ll sign off for now, and I look forward to continuing our discussion about Windows Live. I encourage you to download the new betas from http://download.live.com later today and start using them immediately so that you can enjoy the latest Windows Live enhancements. And of course, please send us your feedback as we’d love to hear what you think.

Chris

You can get translations of this blog in many languages through the Windows Live Translator service.

SAN FRANCISCO — Nov. 1, 2005 — Microsoft Corp. today previewed two new Internet-based software services — Windows Live™ and Microsoft® Office Live — designed to deliver rich and seamless experiences to individuals and small businesses. The new offerings combine the power of software plus services and are compelling enhancements to the Microsoft Windows® and Microsoft Office products. In particular, Windows Live helps bring together all the elements of an individual’s digital world while Office Live helps small companies do business online.

At a briefing for members of the press and analysts, Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman and chief software architect, and Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief technical officer, demonstrated these new offerings for the first time, along with Xbox Live® — all of which reflect the company’s ongoing efforts to harness new delivery and business models for software to provide new value to customers and opportunities for developers and partners.

“These new offerings demonstrate how software is evolving through the power of services in ways that enable more dynamic and relevant experiences for people,” Gates said. “Our goal is to make Windows, Office and Xbox® further come alive for our customers at work, home and play.”

“Our dream is to deliver a seamless experience where all the technology in your life and business comes together in a way that ‘just works’ for you,” said Ozzie. “Seamless experiences put people and the things they want to accomplish at the center, with technology easily and transparently connecting them to the people, devices and information that matter most.”

Windows Live

Windows Live™ is a set of personal Internet services and software designed to bring together in one place all of the relationships, information and interests people care about most, with more safety and security features across their PC, devices and the Web. Microsoft demonstrated early versions of several new Windows Live offerings, some of which are accessible at http://ideas.live.com, a new Web site where people can try the latest Windows Live beta services:

Windows Live will be offered alongside MSN.com, a global leader in services with more than 215 million active MSN Hotmail accounts; more than 185 million MSN Messenger contacts worldwide; and over 25 million MSN Spaces created by individuals to share their photos, Web logs (blogs) and interests with friends. MSN.com will continue to deliver rich programmed content and provide access to Windows Live services.

Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie briefs journalists and analysts on the company’s vision for delivering seamless experiences with Internet-based software services. San Francisco, Nov. 1, 2005. Click for high-res image.

“Millions of people enjoy the programmed content that MSN.com offers, and we will continue to deliver that experience,” said David Cole, senior vice president of MSN. “Users also want more flexibility in creating a personalized experience with access to customized content and communications. That’s what Windows Live delivers.”

Windows Live will primarily be delivered free to users and supported by advertising, but subscription and transaction-based services also will be available. Windows Live extends the capabilities of Windows through standard mechanisms that are publicly available for use by the developer and partner community. Because Windows Live is available separately from the Microsoft Windows product, users will be able to run Windows with or without the Windows Live services.

Microsoft Office Live

The company today also previewed Office Live, a new set of Internet-based services for growing and managing a business online. Designed to help companies establish an online presence, automate key internal and external business tasks, and collaborate with employees, partners and customers, the initial Office Live offerings are targeted at the approximately 28 million small businesses worldwide that have fewer than 10 employees. These services can be used independently but also integrate with Microsoft Office programs used regularly by more than 400 million people around the world, including Microsoft Outlook®, Microsoft Excel®, Microsoft Office Live Meeting and Microsoft Office Small Business Edition. Over time, the scope of Office Live services will expand.

“A key objective of Office Live is to provide small businesses with the power to easily and inexpensively manage their business in a way that large enterprises already enjoy today,” said Rajesh Jha, general manager of Information Worker Services at Microsoft. “With Office Live services, we make complex technology affordable and easy to use for small businesses, empowering them to reach their business goals.”

There are multiple Office Live offerings. Office Live Basics helps a small business establish an online Internet presence including a domain name, a Web site with 30 MB of storage and five Web e-mail accounts at no charge through an advertising-supported model. Office Live also provides a set of subscription-based services with more than 20 business applications to help automate daily business tasks such as project management, sales and collateral management, customer management, expense reports, time and billing management, and secure internal and external collaboration. Built on Windows SharePoint® Services, these applications can be customized and extended to specific customer needs by an extensive Microsoft partner ecosystem.

Office Live services initially will be released via an invitation-only beta in the U.S. in early 2006. Small-business customers can sign up at http://www.officelive.com.

Developer and Partner Opportunities

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates discusses how software is evolving through the power of services. San Francisco, Nov. 1, 2005. Click for high-res image.

Continuing the company’s fundamental commitment to delivering a platform the industry can use to create solutions, Microsoft is making its new live services available to developers to customize, extend and remix. These new services build upon and extend Microsoft’s existing developer platform, tools and ecosystem. Windows Live and Office Live will work with Windows through publicly available application programming interfaces (APIs), available for use by the developer and partner community.

For example, Richard Frost, founder of RE3W World Wide Ltd., an independent software developer specializing in applications related to commercial real estate, demonstrated today at the briefing how its software utilized Windows Live services, specifically Windows Live™ Virtual Earth™, to deliver an enhanced experience to commercial real estate professionals. Through the combination of software and services, the RE3W demonstration highlighted how an individual can search satellite images from Windows Live Local powered by Virtual Earth to identify prospective properties while simultaneously accessing and aggregating information from RE3W’s proprietary data and publicly available ownership records and parcel maps.

With the introduction of these live offerings, Microsoft remains committed to its strategic relationships with telecommunications and hosting service providers to deliver a range of services, including data, video and voice services, to businesses and consumers.

Streamlined Software Delivery

Windows Live and Office Live services will accelerate Microsoft’s delivery of new innovation to customers. Customers will enjoy nearly continuous delivery of new live services and features. In concert with the live services strategy, the Windows development process has been re-engineered to enable more frequent updates across the Windows operating system.

“We are embarking on the richest series of product releases in our company’s 30-year history,” Gates said. “Beyond the opportunities this presents for our customers and partners, these new live offerings represent an incredibly powerful way of enabling customers to more quickly access and benefit from the innovations being developed by our product teams.”

Advertiser Opportunities

The addition of Office Live and Windows Live services enables advertisers to reach an even larger, more engaged audience. Today Ozzie outlined Microsoft’s vision for an advertising network powered by MSN adCenter, where advertisers will have access to tools that provide them with control, insight and intelligence to create more meaningful connections with customers. The advertising network will be open to partners over time so advertisers can connect with a broader audience through traditional media as well as new scenarios such as Internet Protocol television (IPTV) and mobile communications products.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Microsoft, Windows Live, Windows, Xbox Live, Xbox, MSN, Hotmail, Windows OneCare, Outlook, Excel, SharePoint and Virtual Earth are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

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