Microsoft Sets New Web Apps

Windows Live is the company's most ambitious Web initiative yet.

Are you ready to use a browser as your desktop? Microsoft hopes you'll do just that using Web-based software and services bearing the Live label and intended to compete against similar offerings from Google and Yahoo. Whether the effort will succeed is yet unknown, but in the short term there may be useful freebies in it for you.

Microsoft will slap the Live brand on several products with Web components this year; but the first ones, Windows Live and Office Live (both in various stages of testing), tackle everything from localized search and mapping to e-mail and instant messaging. They're not Microsoft's first Web initiatives, but they are the most ambitious.

Specifically, Windows Live includes new e-mail and IM programs plus a customizable Live.com home page, which you can populate with your favorite blogs, RSS news feeds, and mini-apps (requiring Internet Explorer) called Gadgets. Office Live, meanwhile, provides small-business goodies ranging from a free, basic, ad-supported Web page to subscription software bundles. Microsoft hopes third-party software developers will create additional applets for Windows Live and Office Live.

Joys of Live.com

Even if you don't want to use Live.com as your home base, you may like some of its software. For starters, the free Windows Live Mail replaces and improves on Hotmail. It works faster because it's built on Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), the latest hot Web technology, which allows Web-based software to look and behave more like its desktop counterparts, Microsoft's Adam Sohn says.

Another convenience: Live Mail includes 2GB of storage, compared with Hotmail's 250MB limit. Meanwhile, Live Messenger, Microsoft's new IM app, has a feature that lets you share documents (automatically updated via peer-to-peer technology) with fellow Live Messenger users.

New Windows Live Gadgets mini-apps look like Apple's Dashboard and Yahoo's Konfabulator Widgets. Early third-party Gadgets include a rather clunky Pac-Man game and a top-iTunes-downloads tracker.

Gadgets will be able to run in Windows Vista (as a floating object, or in the upcoming OS's Sidebar) as well as in Internet Explorer, something Microsoft hopes will encourage third-party development.

Search With a View: The Windows Live Local search and mapping program gives a unique bird's-eye view of U.S. cities and landmarks.

Also innovative: The Windows Live Local search and mapping service (formerly MSN Virtual Earth) displays bird's-eye, 45-degree-angle images based on satellite photos, along with directions and Yellow Pages info. Satellite images in Google and Yahoo counterparts look straight down and show only rooftops.

In June Microsoft plans to release Windows OneCare Live, a PC security and antivirus service that will cost $50 per year to cover up to three PCs. See a list of Windows Live projects at ideas.live.com.

Small-Biz Smarts

Point and Design: Office Live provides simple design tools to help small-business owners create a free, basic, ad-supported Web page.

Office Live, slated for release in the fall, is designed for companies with fewer than ten people, which typically have no IT staff.

Most notably, Office Live lets you set up a company Web page with five e-mail accounts (at a domain name of your choosing) for free--so long as Microsoft can run business-relevant ads on the page (say, ads for office supplies, but not dating services).

The free Web page deal isn't unique: Yahoo has similarly offered free Web pages to small businesses since spring 2005. Like Microsoft, Yahoo provides design tools and business e-mail (although Microsoft's pages looked a bit more creative in the Office Live beta I tried). But Yahoo has hosting and e-commerce services, as well. Overall, it's too early to tell which giant's small-business services will be better, says Raymond Boggs, IDC's vice president for small-business research.

Ad-Free Options

Customers at a Glance: One of Office Live's 20 Web apps for small businesses gives you a clean look at key customer data.

An ad-free subscription-based alternative, Office Live Collaboration, offers 20 Web-based applications such as a sales activity tracker and project manager, plus access to collaboration features such as a password-protected Web site. A premium version, Office Live Essentials, will add a Web-based version of Front Page for site design, and up to 50 e-mail accounts.

Fees have yet to be set, but don't expect the type of beefy functionality you'd find in Intuit's QuickBooks or Sage's ACT contact manager. In my tests with the Office Live beta, I found that some of the applications are more like templates for organizing small-business data. For example, a "Competition Tracker" stores information about your rivals (number of employees, date founded, and so on). If you've been in business a while and already use a sophisticated contact or project manager, you may not find anything intriguing here.

Web-based programs certainly offer benefits: You can run the apps anywhere you have Web access, vendors take care of updates, and trying something new entails payment for only a month or two. You have to trust your data to Microsoft's servers, however, and you can export data only to Excel or Outlook.

Judging from what's available to date, Microsoft's Live initiative is unlikely to change computing as we know it anytime soon. In time, new applications may yet fulfill the promise of the Web to become the place where breakthrough software makes its debut. Whether it's from Microsoft remains to be seen.