LiveSide - Interview blog

Microsoft is betting heavily on Software + Services, the concept that all the power of the desktop will not go away when services are introduced, rather that storage and computing power, local to the user, will continue to play a big role in how we use computers.  For the past couple of years, David Treadwell has been working along with Ray Ozzie and others to develop what has been known as Windows Live Core, now Windows Live Platform Services.  This platform, which we will be talking quite a bit more about shortly, is the beginnings of a transformation at Microsoft - not switching from Software to Services, but bringing services along as an integral added piece to software.  David Treadwell is the Corporate Vice President for Windows Live Platform Services at Microsoft, and we talked to him at Mix08 about the platform, and how it relates to Windows Live.   

01  00:00:34         Windows Live Platform Services defined: A developer platform for services, blended with client: the best of both worlds

02  00:01:23         Messenger Services Library API: A good example of the Software + Services model

03  00:02:57         Integrating a front end for Messenger into a website

04  00:04:03         The Windows Live Platform: Comparing it to the PC file system in the 80’s; working towards an ability to create a service just like creating an application

05  00:07:36         Identity Services and Interoperability: What’s different from Passport and Hailstorm

06  00:10:39         Issues with ID services: Spam

07  00:11:52         Is Microsoft turning towards an Open model?

08  00:13:12         Advertising? Artificial barriers to keep users will fail in the long run

09  00:14:38         Microsoft is serious about Software + Services

8mb mp3 download  - 17 minutes and 20 seconds

Angus Logan is the Senior Technical Product Manager for Windows Live Platform, a title he only dusts off occasionally.  Usually he's too busy building out content for Windows Live Quick Apps, or creating cool tools like the Messenger IM control, or working with Chris Keating from Windows Live Gallery to build a gadget to add that IM control to Spaces.

We met up with Angus in a conference room in Red West A, where we talked about Windows Live Platform, complete with whiteboarding:

Angus talks about the 5 categories, or buckets, included in the Windows Live Platform, along with the Terms of Use:

• Rich Media (Silverlight, Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live)
• Storage and Sharing
• Communicating and Staying Connected
• Finding and Locating (Search, Virtual Earth)
• Identity / Authentication

We talked about those five categories, took a high level look at the Windows Live Platform, talked about where the platform is and where it's going, and spent some time talking about what's coming up, including CES and Mix08.

Introducing Angus Logan	00:00
A higher level look at Windows Live Platform	00:51
Some possible uses for the IM control; more consumer tools coming	03:25
The 5 categories of Windows Live Platform services	04:31
Terms of use	09:36
What's been announced, and what to look for	11:40
Platform focused on web developers, for now	15:17
"A large social network" gets some new stuff around December	17:02
The Windows Live Team at Mix08	17:39
On releasing tools as soon as possible	19:06
3rd party participation with the Windows Live Platform	20:22
On Quick Apps; lots more to come	24:06

Our interview with Angus Logan  (mp3 12mb  approx 25 minutes) (we'll be adding the Silverlight streaming back in shortly, once we tweak a couple of things)

Windows Live Events, set to launch at the time of this posting, 5pm PDT (Redmond time), is a new feature of Windows Live Spaces that makes it easy to create, manage, and share events using Windows Live Spaces.  Here are some of the highlights of Events:

• Create an event with a single set up page, and customize it with more than 100 templates as well as Windows Live Spaces modules
• Invite guests to the event, using Windows Live Messenger contacts, or invite non-WL ID users by using their email address
• Live Maps integration to show location and directions to the event
• Send out customized invitation emails with links so invitees can view, collaborate, and share photos etc.
• Integrate with user calendars, using 3rd party calendar protocols, including iCal
• Manage discussion lists
• After the event, collect and share photos and comments: keep the event for posterity

While we are awaiting a peek at Events ourselves, it sounds like a promising tool.

For more on Windows Live, Events, and some changes in SkyDrive beta, including a move to 1gb of storage, and a promise that "storage in the long run is not going to be a concern for our users, I had an opportunity to talk with David Fortin, General Manager of Consumer Products for Windows Live.

The highlights

1. What is Windows Live? An overview of the "set of tools to help people connect and share anywhere"
2. Where SkyDrive fits in
3. SkyDrive and the Windows Live Platform
4. The journey starts with delivering individual benefits
5. Announcing SkyDrive 1GB storage limit: "storage in the long run is not going to be a concern for our users"
6. Large storage numbers - really needed or a marketing ploy?
7. Announcing Windows Live Events
8. A quick tour of how to set up an event

download or listen to the interview via .mp3

With 450,000 domains in use with Office Live (now Office Live Small Business), its becoming clear that there is a market for a connected set of services helping small businesses to establish, maintain, and grow a web presence.  We talked with Michael Schultz, U.S. business and marketing lead for Microsoft Office Live Small Business, about small businesses and their website presence, about SEO and SEM, and some partnerships they have developed, specifically with The Search Agency and WebSite Pros.

You can listen to the Silverlight streaming version here, with chapter markers:

1. Why change the name to Office Live Small Business?
2. Three versions: Basics, Essentials, and Premium
3. Most of the customers start out with Basics
4. The value for customers with everything (domain, website building and management, SEO and SEM) all in one place
5. Small businesses want to focus on their business more than website management
6. Search Engine Marketing described
7. Search Engine Optimization: Science and Art
8. The Search Agency and three levels of help: Do It Yourself, Get some help, and Have it done for you.
9. What's coming up?  Users want help to promote and market their business.

Interview with Michael Shultz on Office Live Small Business:

or listen to or download the mp3 8mb.

Office Live Workspaces, announced on Monday and set to go into beta in December, will provide workspace manipulation and storage from within Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and integration with Outlook), and a web browser interface with a viewer for those Office files (and .pdf), and an ability to comment, along with rich list making capabilities that will synch to Outlook Tasks, Contacts, and Calendar.

 

Office Live Small Business (formerly Office Live) is one of the fastest growing Small Business services on the web, with over 450,00 domains registered in two years.  Office Live Workspaces is set to become a feature of the free Office Live Basic service.

I talked to Kirk Gregerson, Director of Product Management for Office for Consumers and Small Business, about the upcoming beta:

1. Introducing Kirk Gregerson, and Office Live Workspaces
2. What is Office Live Workspaces, and what is Microsoft Office Online?
3. How does it work? Kirk talks about Workspaces within Office
4. Office Live Workspaces in the browser
5. Kirk explains the commenting process
6. How collaboration works: a check-in metaphor
7. 2 different interfaces
8. Store many types of (non-Office) files
9. What's the relationship to SkyDrive?
10. Workspace size explained: 500mb limit
11. What versions of Office will work with Workspaces?
12. Integration with Office Live Small Business
13. Beta information - begins in December (sign up now)

.

LiveSide with Kirk Gregerson - Office Live Workspaces.mp3 (9.2mb - 19.38 minutes)

Update: We talk about being able to add comments to non-Office files, and I just got word that this is indeed possible.

POP3, a protocol for getting email from a server to a client, has been around a long time, but it hasn't been generally available for Hotmail users. With the advent of so many different devices (think iPhone), however, a POP3 story is in the process of being added so that users of Hotmail will be able to access their mail through POP3.

Omar Shahine, a Lead Program Manager for Hotmail, announced this somewhat esoteric advance recently on the Windows Live Hotmail blog, and when I was in Mountain View for Searchification, I was able to take a few minutes and talk to Omar about POP3.

With the help of Waggener Edstrom, we found the noisiest room in all of Mountain View (I think we were actually inside the air conditioning system) - just kidding, Jim!, and talked to Omar about Hotmail and POP.

• Chapter 1 - Omar introduces himself
• Chapter 2 - Why doesn't Hotmail offer POP currently, and why is it needed?
• Chapter 3 - Why DeltaSync is desirable
• Chapter 4 - Hotmail has always had a POP interface
• Chapter 5 - We want to give POP to everybody
• Chapter 6 - POP isn't a fantastic user experience
• Chapter 7 - iPhone
• Chapter 8 - IMAP
• Chapter 9 - MSN Premium

(if you don't have Silverlight, you can get the .mp3 here):

LiveSide with Omar Shahine POP.mp3

I had an opportunity to sit down with Satya Nadella, Corporate Vice President, Search & Advertising Platform Group, right after he presented at Searchification. We talked about the "super-positive" internal buzz within Microsoft about the new search, some strategies for how to increase search share (by going after the 70 million users of Live Search now, and the 500 million MSN users who may or may not be using Live Search as much as they could). I'll be adding in some more notes this weekend, and getting our dev guy Scott to help with a Silverlight version, but for now in the interest of getting this out, here's the unadorned .mp3 file. Enjoy (and thanks, Satya!)

Chapter Points:

0.00 Internal Beta + Employee Buzz
1.46 70m Live Search users - How to retain them with UI and features
3.31 Targeting the Windows Live and MSN users to increase search share
4.55 Branding issues - Will Live Search remain as Microsoft's search brand? Satya neatly avoids the question.
5.50 Focus on MSN.com over Live.com users - The 70m Live Search users come from MSN
7.57 Search: good user experience v advertising medium
10.27 This release of Live Search and the future
11.48 What is the one feature that needs the most work

LiveSide with Satya Nadella at Searchification.mp3 (11.3mb, 12 minutes 50 seconds)

At MixUK this week, I got a chance to sit down with Danny Thorpe and Angus Logan who are both very much involved with the Windows Live Platform. It was an interesting chat, finding out some new information, so take a listen. The breakdown of the interview is as follows:

00:15 - Intros
01:04 - What's been at Mix UK
01:51 - Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live
05:20 - What is Windows Live Data? (Can you spot my deliberate mistake)
09:30 - Future APIs? SkyDrive perhaps? REST vs SOAP vs ?
12:13 - Public knowledge of the Windows Live Platform and the WL Developer community
17:10 - Visual Studio Toolkit for Windows Live
18:58 - Closing up.

What really got my attention was the Toolkit that is coming for Visual Studio, it's great to see something like this being done, and hopefully makes it that bit easier for developers to leverage the Windows Live Platform.

For the first time, we are also letting you listen to the interview from within this blog entry and we are doing this using Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live. I have also included "chapter" points in the audio, so pressing the skip button (next to the stop button) will take you straight to the points mentioned above. (Watch out for a post later showing just how I went about doing all this).

Listen: LiveSide with Danny Thorpe and Angus Logan.mp3, Duration: 19:56, Filesize: 9.12mb

SL

Windows Live Gallery is the "one stop shop" for gadgets and add-ins for Windows and Windows Live.  The site has recently upgraded with a new look and some new content, and we talked to Lead Program Manager Chris Butler about Gallery, about the changes, and about some new features coming for Gallery.

00:00    Chris describes Windows Live Gallery
01:22    Messenger content is now on Gallery
02:40    Partner tiers
04:44    What to do now to get into the Silver tier
06:00    The Nielson numbers
09:07    Lowering the bar so anyone can create Gallery items
11:00    How to get developer information on Gallery

While all the details of the new partner tiers have not been completed, Chris says there are four basic tiers:

Gold - for premium partners - for those with some kind of business arrangement with Microsoft

Silver - for those who are making a great contribution to the community, providing great content

Regular - for occasional contributors

Microsoft - a special category for Microsoft content  - so that MS content is easily identifiable.

In addition to visual differentiation, the partner tiers will allow for special programmatic access to add, edit, and update content.

We should be hearing more about partner tiers in the "next weeks and months"

 

Windows Live Gallery

Windows Live Gallery DevCenter

LiveSide with Chris Butler - Windows Live Gallery  11 minutes, 10mb .mp3

Our previous post on Windows Live Gallery updates

Some new stuff and some interesting numbers from Spaces: it's now available in 51 countries in 25 languages, there have been 93 million spaces created since Spaces was released, and more than 111 million people a month use Spaces. More than 18 million photos 8 million photos (corrected, see Chris Keating's comment below) a day are uploaded to Spaces, with over 4 billion photos added since day 1.  So with that here's the list of improvements Spaces will be announcing in the morning:

Windows Live Spaces is adding a bunch of new features as we speak including:

• A new home page with information on people in your social network and new stuff on your Spaces like comments, messages, and pending requests.
  
• More customization features with more colors and themes, and now the ability to upload and add a custom image as a background for your space
  
• A new Guestbook feature (finally, woohoo!)
  
• A new messaging feature - send a message to "your Spaces friends and meet other people on Spaces by sending them messages".  Hover over a picture profile and you'll see a "send a message" link, or use the link in the Visitor tools module on a person's space.
  
• Lots of added functionality to Gadgets and Modules, including spanning the full width of a column, removing borders, and changing titles, and a new ability to add multiple modules at the top or bottom of your space that span all of the columns - "perfect for your space title and tagline".  You can also have more than one of the same gadget on your space.
  
• Improvements to photo management, including a new page for viewing and editing albums on your space, and a new layout for individual photos pages, making it easier and faster to view your photos and see all comments at a glance.
  
• Improved Mobile interaction with Spaces, including the ability to see at a glance recent updates and comments on your space, add, delete, view, and browse your friends, and view profile information, all from your mobile device.
  
• Book and music lists are improved, and they look better in narrow view
  
• Some dev improvements, too: including individual rss feeds for profiles, photo albums, blog categories, top-level directories, friends, and lists; a new set of APIs for sending messages, adding gadgets, and adding modules; and support for one-click customization of gadgets when added to a space.

 

You can check out The Space Craft for more information on the new features (the blog entry will be up in the morning), and we'll be bringing you more on them here, too, of course . 

Windows Live Hotmail, a completely rebuilt web based mail client set to replace MSN Hotmail, started its rollout to selected markets this week.  This morning, I talked on the phone with two members of the Windows Live Hotmail team from their offices in Mountain View, California.  Omar Shahine and Ellie Powers-Boyle have been working on "Kahuna" since 2004, and we talked about the code base, the beta, performance, and more.

Omar and Ellie introduce themselves	00:00
Hotmail signup has a new code base, too	01:45
Initial reports on the first stages of the rollout	03:08
What the user will see and what they won't see but will notice	04:19
Balancing performance and features	08:55
A new code base positions WL Hotmail to compete	12:50
Ellie talks about a unique beta	16:49
Windows Live Calendar and @live.com accounts: I had to ask	23:27

Download and listen to the 10mb .mp3

 

 

Office Live is set to come out of beta on Wed. Nov 15, and at the same time launch into beta in four new markets, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan.  The set of services, aimed at very small businesses (VSB), offers free custom domains, domain name Office Live Mail and Windows Live Messenger accounts, and a tiered set of services, from the free Office Live Basics, to Office Live Essentials ($19.95/mo) and Office Live Premium ($39.95/mo).

The new launch introduces some new services - an AdManager beta that initially features Microsoft adCenter and Live Search ads but will be expanded to include other search engines and business directories in the next 6-12 months, a new online Business Contact Manager with browser access from anywhere or a full offline component using Microsoft Office 2007, and, with MS Office Accounting Express 2007, product sales management through eBay.  Again, this service is due to be expanded in 6-12 months to include other sales venues such as Shopping.com, Craig's List, Windows Live Expo, and sales through Office Live websites.

I spoke to Baris Cetinok, Director of Project Management and Marketing for Office Live, about the new release.  We covered a lot of ground in a short time, and Baris is a fun guy to listen to.  Enjoy!

LiveSide interview - Baris Cetinok of Office Live 
(8.71mb download)

VSBs - under served by technology	0:00
New Features: AdManager and Site Designer	2:49
The AdManager Beta	5:07
Office Live Business Contact Manager	5:59
eBay and more: Accounting Express 2007	8:29
Surprises from the beta: non-profits	11:54
Continued improvement on Collaboration	15:14
Migrating from the beta	18:24
End	19:02

For more on Office Live (and lots of other Windows Live offerings) check out the LiveSide List.  I'll be updating the Office Live article quite a bit in the next day or two, so check back often!

Last week, Harrison got the chance to talk with Stephen Lawler, General Manager for Live Local/Virtual Earth product development, about their new release, making its debut this week.  He has some really interesting things to say about their vision for Virtual Earth, innovative monetization, and where Virtual Earth is going from here.  So, enjoy the new release and give this one a listen.

0:00 Introductions
0:15 The Vision
1:10 The Problem with Search Today
1:37 Extending Search into the Real World
2:36 The Announcement
3:58 Photorealistic Cities
6:20 What does this mean for 3rd party developers?
7:00 Advertising in Virtual Earth's New 3D Mode (Virtual Billboards)
9:40 How does it work?
11:35 How does Streetside fit into the picture?
13:18 Where is the 3D view launching?
14:16 Extent of the integration in 3rd party application
15:28 Are there any plans for a standalone client?
17:28 Virtual Earth Mobile application?
18:03 Any plans for Virtual Earth branded hardware?
18:38 Wrap-up

LiveSide with Stephen Lawler

Length: 19 minutes and 13 seconds
File Size: 17.5 MB

Last week LiveSide sat down with some people from Live Search to talk about a wide range of topics, including the switch from MSN Search to Live Search, the Windows Live name and brand, migrating MSN Search users and acquiring new ones, Live Local, QnA, Google and Page Rank, and a lot more.

My apologies if I spell some names wrong, but the participants were:

Neil Freeland:      Marketing Programs and Acquisition
Laura Kern:         User Experience
Sebastian Gard:  Evangelism for Live Search
Sean Nordberg:   Group Program Manager,Windows Live Local Search
and thanks to Kevin Briody from Windows Live for putting it all together.

A couple of links referenced in the discussion:

Nicholas Carr: Beyond Question - Oct 2, 2006
Comscore: Local Search Continues to Gain Momentum - Sept. 28, 2006

I broke up the interview into two parts to make it a bit easier to download, or you can listen to the whole thing at once:

Download the full Interview (20mb mp3 - 44 minutes)
Download Part One  (8.5mb mp3 - 18 minutes)
Download Part Two  (11.5mb mp3 - 26 minutes)

(edit: fixed links to point to direct download)

 

Now that the word on Windows Live Writer is out, LiveSide has the exclusive interview with J.J. Allaire, the founder of Onfolio and Architect of the Writer team. You may remember that Onfolio was acquired by Microsoft back in March of this year. Since that time, J.J. and his team have been hard at work developing Windows Live Writer for Microsoft. In this interview, I talk with J.J. about the inspiration behind Windows Live Writer, their killer features for this release, and what we can expect from their team in the future. This is a really interesting one, make sure to give it a listen!



0:00 Introductions
0:21 Who are you and what do you do?
0:50 The History of Windows Live Writer.
1:15 What was the inspiration behind Writer?
2:35 What to expect from this release.
5:08 Image editing
6:08 Blog compatibility
8:14 Major features
10:44 Talking about the SDK
12:23 What's your killer feature?
13:09 Looking past this release (What's ahead for Writer.)
14:20 Wrap up (Where you can download Writer and where you can get more info.)

Total Length: 14 minutes and 56 seconds
File Size: 13.6 MB

LiveSide with J.J. Allaire

For more information on Windows Live Writer, visit their team blog:

WindowsLiveWriter.spaces.live.com