Microsoft News Tracker

Windows Live Spaces was launched on Tuesday and immediately ran into difficulties as Juan Carlos Perez reports at InfoWorld:

Microsoft’s highly anticipated upgrade of its MSN Spaces blogging and social networking service has run into significant and unforeseen performance problems.

Microsoft began rolling out the “next generation” version of the service, dubbed Windows Live Spaces, on Tuesday night, but things got quite bumpy along the way.

For more than 12 hours, pages loaded extremely slowly at best, and at worst they didn’t render properly at all, according to a message posted late Wednesday by Microsoft on the official MSN Spaces blog.

“We know we disappointed a bunch of you with the issues we had in our roll-out last night,” the message reads. “We planned long and hard for this release and unfortunately it was one of those gotchas that only showed up once we were in production.”

There are apparently still some lingering problems, but this was a major re-plumbing of MSN Spaces which isn’t a little deal.

LiveSide says Windows Live Spaces is Live! This is the upgraded MSN Spaces personal blogging service, now with the Windows Live brand. We mentioned some pertinent features back in June when it had been rumored to be coming in mid-July. Check it out for yourself at http://spaces.live.com/. I wonder what kind of marketing it will get?

Ed Oswald at BetaNews:

Microsoft said Friday that it was preparing to migrate its Spaces blogging service to its Windows Live brand, and with the change the company will add new features and tighter integration with other Windows Live services.

Although no specific date for the switch has been announced, sources tell BetaNews the service is expected to debut July 15.

Hit the link for all the new features including social networking enhancements, but here’s the ka-ching part:

Banner ads will replace the current method of using text ads across the top of the site. Microsoft has said in the past that advertising would support the Windows Live service, keeping it free. However, an option is provided to turn off the ads by subscribing to the Hotmail Plus service.

And Hotmail Plus is $19.95 per year. I expect there will be some resistance to this form of monetization which bears an unfortunate resemblance to the old “build your own Web site” services (e.g. GeoCities) and their annoying banners, although the early screenshots at the Spaces blog make it look less intrusive. It also doesn’t help that Google’s free Blogger service has no mandated ads, but offers the blogger the option of making some money with Google’s AdSense contextual ads.

Press release:

May 24, 2006 — MSN® Spaces is the most widely used blogging service worldwide with more than 100 million unique visitors, according to data released today by comScore Networks Inc. of Reston, Va., an independent Internet audience measurement and consulting company.

comScore World Metrix’s proprietary audience report for April 2006 showed the total number of unique visitors to MSN Spaces has more than doubled in the past 12 months, from 41.65 million to 101 million.* Figures compiled by comScore Media Metrix indicate that during April 2006, nearly one in seven Internet users worldwide had visited MSN Spaces.

The asterisk is because comScore is unable to count unique visitors from some countries like China.

While this is certainly an achievement, I hope it isn’t too Scrooge-like to inquire about monetization. Or more succinctly, now that they’ve got the eyeballs, where’s the cash?

You may recall that back in February, Google got some favorable publicity for providing hosted Gmail for students at San Jose City College. At the time, some Microsoft PR people were upset that Microsoft wasn’t getting equal ink for their own similar program which no one else seemed to know about. The obvious answer was for Microsoft to publicize their own offering and if you were waiting with bated breath for that to happen, you can relax, because on Friday they released a Press Q&A about the Windows Live @ edu program featuring Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland as the reference customer:

In January, the university began rolling out e-mail accounts with its domain name to all 15,000 students and plans to offer the service to its alumni as well. Students aren’t likely to bump up against mailbox limits; the e-mail accounts, now based on MSN Hotmail, each come with a 250MB mailbox and will grow to 2GB when students are switched to Microsoft’s new Windows Live Mail later this year. The e-mail service also brings the features Watson’s discerning students demand – advanced junk e-mail filtering, antivirus protection tools, calendar and an address book.

Along with the e-mail service came a big bonus. Using the same ID, the university is also deploying Windows Live Messenger so students and staff can keep in touch with free audio and video conversation features as well as text messaging; MSN Spaces for participants to share blogs and build communities; and MSN Alerts so the university can notify students of special events. Students can access their e-mail wirelessly from smart phones and Pocket PCs – a major benefit given the ubiquity of mobile devices among students and the freedom those devices give them to send and retrieve e-mail without returning to a desktop computer. And Glasgow Caledonian University didn’t have to purchase an expensive e-mail system – because Microsoft is providing and hosting this service.

Glasgow Caledonian University may be special in many ways, but its deal with Microsoft isn’t one of them. Some 57 schools worldwide have either rolled out or have contracted to roll out their own branded and customized versions of this service from Microsoft and as many as 100 institutions are expected to do so by year end. All are participating in the Windows Live @ edu program, which provides institutions of higher education with flexible, robust and reliable hosted-communications services for students, alumni, and applicants. A minimal financial and infrastructure investment is made by the university to participate in the program, with Microsoft hosting the e-mail service while helping ensure the institutions maintain full control and management, including the ability to create, delete, and store e-mail addresses for their constituents.

As we mentioned at the time, the minimal investment is an installation of “Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) on a Windows Server to handle the user management.” That rather keeps it from being a hands-off offering like Google’s, but either one is undoubtedly a good deal for the schools since they are free. As for Google and Microsoft, besides the public relations value, what they are offering is only a little different from what is already free to all comers on the Internet with the exception of using the school’s domain name.