Microsoft’s Windows Live Brand to Die
Microsoft has been known for some confusing brands at times and one of those is Windows Live. This is a broad term covering a wide range of its desktop and internet services, which they admitted confused customers, “Windows Live service and apps were built on versions of Windows that were simply not designed to be connected to a cloud service for anything other than updates, and as a result, they felt ‘bolted on’ to the experience,” said Microsoft VP Chris Jones, in a blog post Wednesday. “This created some amount of customer confusion.”
This was used for such disparate services as authentication (Windows Live ID), storage (Live Mesh and Windows Live Mesh), and e-mail (Windows Live Mail). On top of that, Microsoft operated almost identical services, under different brands. Confusion was almost inevitable. With Windows 8, Microsoft will introduce much simpler, more descriptive names such as SkyDrive for cloud storage and Mail app for email. There’s a lot more on this at the link below.
Windows 8 provides us with an opportunity to reimagine our approach to services and software and to design them to be a seamless part of the Windows experience, accessible in Windows desktop apps, Windows Metro style apps, standard web browsers, and on mobile devices. Today the expectation is that a modern device comes with services as well as apps for communication and sharing. There is no separate brand to think about or a separate service to install it is all included when you turn on your PC for the first time.
Comments are closed.