Window Live

Windows Live was an answer to Apple’s iLife suite in just about every possible way. It offered a number of tools that were quite similar to the offerings that Apple had. A quick breakdown would look something like this:

iPhoto – Photo Gallery

iMovie – Microsoft Movie Maker

iMessage – Messenger

iCloud – SkyDrive

Garage Band – Nothing

Now iLife is one of the tool sets where Apple wins hands down with the features that each of their tools holds and the integration between all of them. Within iPhoto you have the ability to share out to Facebook and other social media outlets with little effort on the part of the user.

The Windows 8 Gallery has the option to share, however that option is removed in Windows 8.1 (when last I used it). I think this was a mistake. Regardless of the ability to tweak your photos, people want easy ways to share their photos without having to jump from app to app.

Speaking of jumping from App to App, iLife is so strongly integrated with everything that it’s effortless to make use of for even the most novice user. This is an issue for Microsoft as more and more people are beginning to use the software.

In the past, Microsoft has taken the stance that most people aren’t likely to make use the more advanced features of a photo software, something which is becoming more and more a misnomer and something that Microsoft seemed to be playing toward when they released their Microsoft Live suite of applications that included Movie Maker, Photogallery and Windows Mail.

When Photo Gallery was originally released, it seemed to be an answer to iPhoto, however in the Windows 8 version, much of that functionality has been stripped, which is why I also find it fascinating that in Windows 8.1 they added some basic editing features back in, but removed the Social Networking integration which seems to be so key for people in this day and age.

On the other hand, I wonder if Microsoft is moving toward an OS only approach of software development. Not that they won’t continue to create Microsoft Office, but those two divisions have been more or less separate entities for decades.

I’m honestly not certain which direction MS will ultimately take with this, but my hope is that they don’t go with the OS only approach and start to focus more on a suite of applications that Consumers would be interested in using and that have incredible integration with each other, with other software titles and with social networking.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: Microsoft needs to stop the Design By Committee approach to software development.

This topic deserves more, but there’s been so much going on and I’m so behind in posting, I’m just going to toss this one up for the time being and try to pick up on it later.

Next time I’ll be discussing my first real experience in dealing with tech support since I started this experiment.