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Wednesday, November 2, 2005

Windows Live?

Bill Gates announced “Windows Live” and “Office Live.” Maybe he had enough of people’s chatter about the emerging Google OS? But a little less talk and a little more action please... the Windows Live homepage looks underwhelming in Internet Explorer, and is plain broken in Firefox*.

So now on Live.com we have weather forecasts, stock quotes, email, horoscopes, an RSS reader... and a “ticking clock” (it tells you the time). You can drag & drop and expand & collapse sections to your liking, and if you’re logged in, you can also see your new Hotmail messages right on the front-page (ironically, not even Hotmail does that). It reminds me of Microsoft’s Start.com (another cool domain name, admittedly), and I don’t know why these are two seemingly independent initiatives. As soon as we see MS Word, MS Excel, and MS PowerPoint as actual working (D)HTML pages, this could become interesting.

The underlying HTML code on Live.com, by the way, shows traces of web statistic “SiteCatalyst” by Omniture. It includes the typical copyright notes as well as comments like "/************* DO NOT ALTER ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE ! **************/”. Otherwise, the code doesn’t quite qualify as XHTML Intentional (only 19 errors on the front-page).

*Google has been releasing stuff in higher frequency lately and the quality level at times lacks the wow factor of earlier Google services (think Google Talk), but I don’t think they’d dare releasing something without real Firefox support... if only because it displeases Firefox users, who are among the more influential tech crowds out there.

[Via John Battelle.]

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