Windows Live Brand Fades Into the Sunset - Digital Domain (original) (raw)
Business|Goodbye to Windows Live (and Whatever It Meant)
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Digital Domain
Goodbye to Windows Live (and Whatever It Meant)
- May 26, 2012
IF you own a Windows-based PC, you may like the operating system well enough. Or you may merely tolerate it, if you give it much thought at all. But whatever your feeling, “love” probably isn’t the word that immediately comes to mind to describe it.
I bring this up because Microsoft acts as if its customers have a strong affection for all things Windows. For the last seven years, it has tried to make Windows the anchor brand for software that is not an operating system.
An array of products, with no natural connections to one another, have received the “Windows Live” moniker. Windows Live Essentials, for example, was the name for a suite of software products that could be installed on a PC, and included photo management, video editing and instant messaging. Windows Live Mesh provided file synchronization among one’s personal computers, including Macs. And the list went on: Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Search, Windows Live Toolbar, Windows Live Family Safety, Windows Live Writer, and others.
It was folly.
Windows Live Essentials turned out to be less than essential after all. The company is effectively leaving behind the Windows Live brand name as it renames the products that currently feature that two-word phrase.
This strange marketing episode originated in the success that Microsoft enjoyed with its Xbox Live service, which was introduced in 2001. It allowed players of Xbox games to use Internet connections to play one another in real time, so adding “Live” to “Xbox” made perfect sense.
In 2005, however, Microsoft executives decided that “Live” could enliven its core Windows and Office brands, too. In a news briefing in 2005, Bill Gates said the goal of the company’s newly announced Live-branded services was to “make Windows, Office and Xbox further come alive for our customers at work, home and play.”
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