Damn it, and I really liked what they were doing and the direction they were going with it. Now Windows Live Mail has been rebranded Windows Live Hotmail, ostensibly to "avoid confusing Hotmail subscribers." Give me a fucking break. As if there weren't any way to do the same thing without breaking what was a clean, tight branding scheme. And then there's what's been referred to as the "January Effect" -- essentially, an obfuscatory bit of buzz to describe a handful of Windows Live services being rebranded back to MSN. Look: Vista and Windows Live were catch-up, meant to bring MS products and services up to par with both Mac OS X and services like Yahoo and Google. And pairing the new web-based services with a new brand was exactly the right direction to go in order to do that. Why in the name of God would it make sense to take a giant step backward and shuffle them into MSN's lackluster status quo? Dumb bastards.
I can't see myself using Live Office or anything like that. If I have Open Office on my hard drive and flash drive, why do I need a internet office suite?
I'm still waiting for it to actually offer online versions of Word and so on. So far all I've seen are domain-name type stuff, which -- considering you can't upload pages created outside Office Live's own page editor, last time I looked -- doesn't thrill me overly much.
Office Live is really more of a FrontPage replacement, not an Office replacement. As of yet, I think it's been poorly branded, and gives a false sense of what it is.
Yeah, well they were doing really well there for awhile. And it's not so much that the services themselves aren't good -- they really are. It's just their branding tactics with those services that are going to Shitville on a fast train.
