Last week, I wrote about the new improved SkyDrive and was thrilled to see how it integrates with windows explorer. This week, I’ve been hearing and reading about how Microsoft is discarding the Windows Live name and programs in favor of Windows 8 and the Metro Style Apps.
So now everyone (or many of us), are wondering what all will happen with both the ‘live’ name as it relates to our email accounts. There are over 350 million live/hotmail users – with the live name going away and Microsoft 8’s new ‘Mail App’, what will happen with our @live.com mail addresses? You can read Microsoft’s Sinofsky article here.
So why is ‘Live’ going away? According to the article, the Windows Live Essentials family of free software wasn’t all they wanted it to be. It didn’t feel integrated and connected enough and they felt user’s weren’t getting the service and experience they wanted to deliver.
So what do they want to deliver? Apps! It’s more than that, of course, but with the popularity of the iPhone and the burgeoning App popularity, Microsoft has also gone to Apps, both with its Windows Phone and with Windows 8. So you can see from the chart below that email will be called ‘Mail App, our calendars will be a ‘Calendar App’, and so on. SkyDrive will become a big part of where everything will be stored, accessed and fetched, thus the recent upgrade of SkyDrive.
Not everything has been worked out yet and people still have a lot of questions about how our favorite Live Essential programs will function with Windows 8. I’ve been using most of them and wonder what’s ahead. Perhaps more information with be coming soon, but I anticipate many of the changes will happen when Windows 8 is released around October, 2012. Change is hard, but it’s here.
There’s a chart supplied that is a bit confusing (at least to me).
-published May 11, 2012