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Windows Live Goes to College
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Tue Apr 25, 2006 02:26 AM
from the captive-audiences-101 dept.
from the captive-audiences-101 dept.
Tobias writes "BetaNews is reporting that Microsoft has struck a deal with 72 different colleges to use Windows Live for their email services. The problem with this is that Windows Live does not support any browsers besides IE 6, does not support POP or IMAP, and does not support email forwarding." From the article: "The Redmond company believes that catching the students early on will turn them into life-long users of Windows Live. They would likely create a Windows Live Messenger account, start a blog and organize their favorites under this e-mail account -- especially if they plan to continue using it, Microsoft says."
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Microsoft promises no ulterior plans. (Score:5, Funny)
Can they do that?
From the article:
"But although there has been a rapid uptake of the service, the company says it still meets resistance and skepticism. In return, Microsoft has been assuring education institutions that its only motivation is to get students using Windows Live, promising there are no ulterior plans."
Re:Microsoft promises no ulterior plans. (Score:5, Insightful)
how long... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:how long... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:how long... (Score:3, Funny)
2.) Tell cron to execute the script daily
3.) Rejoice as you don't have to deal with the thing anymore, except for the occ
Re:how long... (Score:3, Informative)
See how they feel after one virus/worm cycle (Score:3, Insightful)
It does work on Firefox (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It does work on Firefox (Score:4, Informative)
It doesn't work. Microsoft is dragging their feet on Firefox support because, once again, their programmers do not know how to write to standards. Either that, or their managers are telling the programmers to wait on implementing a "workaround" for non-IE browers.
My guess though is that it's the former-- Microsoft simply doesn't hire employees that know or care about web standards. These guys are probably just learning about Firefox and the DOM as they go. They've only ever written to Microsoft's own JavaScript extensions.
In other words, they are incompetent.
Re:It does work on Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong. Never attribute to stupidity what can be adequately explained by malice.
Re:It does work on Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It does work on Firefox (Score:3, Funny)
When you access Windows Live Mail Beta on Firefox you are getting absolutely NO ajax-style features.
No Ajax? What do they think this is, Web 1.0 circa 2005?
Fucking cavemen.
Hate to break it to you, YOU ARE WRONG (Score:4, Informative)
There is no preview pane.
Sure is! Pretty pictures and all. Looks like Bush is probing gas prices.
There is no interactivity whatsoever.
I can drag/drop windows around, pop config menus, hit the +,- buttons, sure works great for me!
Suggest upgrading your Firefox. Or turning Javascript back on. One of the two.
Re:It does work on Firefox (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It does work on Firefox (Score:4, Funny)
C'mon Mozilla, hurry up, you're behind the fucking curve.
Re:It does work on Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)
The slashdot poster must have added his just added the extra spice to get posted on slashdot.
As far as your 'in other words' interpretation please go check out the channel9 presentations on windows live wherein they talk about their support for firefox.
Ok (Score:3, Interesting)
So, why did they do this? This mail service sounds like garbage (no offense MS). I can't use any standard email client with it.
Re:Ok (Score:4, Funny)
I think that was one of the design goals.
Re:Ok (Score:5, Insightful)
The entire thing will be a serious pain in the ass for anyone with even mediocre IT savvy; the people who are used to using a web client will have no problems and are the easy audience for MS here (with MS hoping to use the structure of Windows Live to keep them as clients when they leave, since then they keep all their contacts etc); and the setup also forces the rest of the students - those who would prefer to do things in any of a variety of other ways - to stoop to using their system. MS are effectively pulling in a pile of easy targets, and then putting a big wall around the hard targets so they are stuck whether they like it or not. As seen in a good thread above, the common language means it does function in FF, but breaks its major featureset. Anyone in firefox will be stuck with a closed interface, and you won't find bets against that improving in a hurry, because it would be a door in that big wall MS are setting up.
Whether or not they're losing lockin elsewhere, they've jumped on the opportunity to get a new generation before that generation gets savvy enough to get up in arms about what's being done to them. Sure, there'll be a few, but not enough until someone writes an interface that shapes packets to enable automation of the features that MS are intentionally leaving out.
IMAP has been around for 20 years; POP3 for 12. The longevity and widespread use of these protocols is vast in terms of the internet and email; 20 years is a vast timespan for this arena. Yet MS have designed something that prevents both. I have no idea how long automatic email forwarding has been around for, but again it's something that MS have left out.
When I saw the summary on the front page, I saw it was tagged 'monopoly'. I initially dismissed that, because I thought that with email you can't get a monopoly so the tag was irrelevant in this case. But when you force, force, force people to use your system with no way of connecting it up to their other systems, and use the weight of an educational institution to enable that lockin, then it is indeed a monopoly. They're not getting any money from it yet (I very much hope an institution wouldn't pay for this system) so the traditional connotations of 'monopoly' aren't there yet - but they're forcing people in while and where they can't do anything about it. Keep the number of people, they'll get their profits, whether it's in systems required to be able to use their services or something further down the line for Windows Live.
The most irritating aspect for me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some might argue that Google have a hidden agenda (and no-one has quite worked out what that is yet) but with their offerings such as their GMail for Businesses, regular GMail, Calendar, etc there isn't a 'hook' - its just there. You use it, you don't - You like it, you don't - so what.
With Microsoft its always something like "We want to get people to be lifelong users" or "We reserve the right to turn on adverts when people graduate" - there is always a caveat or other reason rather than "This is a damn good product - we think it will sell itself".
I can't wait to be rid of Windows at home and just be done with Microsoft.
Re:The most irritating aspect for me... (Score:4, Insightful)
Statistics in your face. (Score:4, Insightful)
The Microsoft platform monopoly is very weak right now. Any web application designed for a single version of M$ will fail for about half of your users. While they still have sizable majority of OS use, you can't count on a specific version being present. When you permutate that with browser used, your numbers fall even more.
Less than 60% of people use IE 6 [w3schools.com]. That means about two in five people will not be able to use this stupid service.
Even M$ OS share is slipping. XP, the "dominant" platform only has 79% of the market. If you take out what people use at work, the Linux + Mac percentage is probably better than 10% now.
So, while IE 6 is "available" to a majority of users, 25% prefer something else. In short, they care.
If your school cares, they won't be using this service.
I've tried Windows live email .. EEEK! (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, I can't even see my folders - after using hotmail live for about a minute, the folders section is reduced to about 1mm in size.... also, when you are reading EVERY email, there is an AD right next to the email reading window - and so you are forced to read that stupid ad with every email that you read...
msn/hotmail live SUX! they are just trying badly to copy gmail! maybe their servers are clogged up or something to explain the bad refresh speed...
The thing is... (Score:5, Interesting)
So, uh, all hype, and it's sorta nerdy - but does it matter?
Re:The thing is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The thing is... (Score:4, Insightful)
You might say that if the CS department had any clout in terms of IT decisions that they would use that clout to block the adoption of this service. That said, I'm not sure the faculty in technical fields have much say in anything. I'm an undergrad at a university with a well-respected Computer Engineering department and the department's IT staff mandates crappy and broken "web boards" instead of newsgroups, won't set up servers for things like CVS/SVN (supposedly they'd rather try to roll their own web-based stuff, so classes tend to use whatever places they have available to set up repositories) and refuses to set up a Linux lab when that's what a class desires (instead we had a lab of Windows machines running Linux under Virtual PC, which is mostly adequate but sometimes a bit of a pain). The web-based portal that all their services go through has a bunch of ads on it, which is probably the reason they want as many services as possible to rely on it. The students and the faculty don't have a lot of choice in the matter. Either way, we can still learn the same ideas even if we don't always do it in the most elegant way possible.
CS department != IT (Score:5, Informative)
My uni has a decent CS department, who run everything for their department themselves. We have access to their solaris machines and we have all of the normal mail (POP3/IMAP/SMTP) services, and can SSH to the machines etc. etc.
The university however (and anyone on any other course) has to make use of crappy Novell Netware webmail. I could easily see them moving to this new MS system if the managers high up in the IT department were sent enough free copies of Office by MS, or whatever they are bribing them all with.
When this list is published, expect to see a lot of top uni's with deccent CS departments in there. And whether or not they have a decent CS department or not, we can't say "oh it's ok, they don't have MIT so it doesn't mean anything" - MS are still going to be forcing literally hundreds of thousands of upcoming young adults into only knowing their own proprietary system.
Re:CS department != IT (Score:3, Informative)
It's a little more complicated than that, but, yeah.
I work for the Technical Staff of the CS department at Virginia Tech. Our department is not responsible for the university infrastructure (that's these guys [vt.edu]). However, we are closely tied in with them.
Windows Live Goes to College... (Score:5, Funny)
Ok .. time for a bad analogy (Score:4, Funny)
Who was it that said
Government control (Score:3, Insightful)
webmail (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not nearly as good as an e-mail client where you can organize, flag, set rules, mark certain domains with colors bla bla. Also, who wants to refresh the page every x minutes to check for email, or have it reloading and wasting a IE page or tab in firefox/opera whatever when you can just have a small client open and every x minute goes and checks for messages. And the lack of forwarding sucks. What if you want to forward yesterday's notes to your lab partner(s) because he was out sick? Not supporting POP? I'm not sure that's such a big deal, unless it means it doesn't have a pop server that you can't log into. If that's true then see my above comments.
What schools? (Score:3, Interesting)
About Time (Score:5, Funny)
About time somebody went to college... I hear the founder was a dropout
<giggle/> <Chuckle/> Love those guys. (Score:3, Insightful)
Do they really think they're going to compete with gmail that late in the kids' lives?
Just like McDonalds... (Score:4, Insightful)
MS, used to be "good" used to be the underdog taking on IBM and Big Iron. Bringing affordable computing to the little guy, breaking the Vender Lock In (tm)...
"Whoever battles monsters should take care not to become a monster too, for if you stare long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss stares also into you."
--Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, chapter 4, no. 146
Its a shame, really it is...
Re:Just like McDonalds... (Score:3, Funny)
--Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, chapter 4, no. 146
Who's this Nietzsche guy, and why is he ripping off Dylan Hunt quotes?
-
Re:Just like McDonalds... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Just like McDonalds... (Score:4, Funny)
Students might not accept it (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, man. I can just imagine the reaction if my University tried to bring in something like this. It wouldn't just be the Software Libre lunatic fringe objecting -- we have a lot of fairly technically-capable students who like to read and store their mail on their laptops, and they'd howl the place down. Even the relatively technically unclued around here do their browsing with Firefox.
Mac users would particularly hate it, especially considering Microsoft's recent statements regarding IE on OSX.
outsided again (Score:3, Interesting)
I s'pose that if I were at one of these schools, I would take one glance at it, decide that it's a valiant effort but incompatible with the world at large in a typically-for-MS sort of way, and not use it.
Meaning I'd probably be locked out of communicating with 90%+ of my peers (who are invariably less picky and don't mind (or notice?) being locked into being life-long users of one specific application).
Which is why I have about 3 friends. So all of the above is more or less immaterial (but nonetheless now captured for posterity).
great choice for teaching marketing (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a matter of control (Score:3, Insightful)
G. Orwell
Lessee - a filtered search engine, control of all incoming and outgoing communications, a Media Center telescreen on the wall at the commons and in most of the rooms...
Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?
O'Brien: Of course he exists.
They Might Be Right (Score:3, Interesting)
Just think of how many people (Joe Average types, not geeks) started off with DOS/Windows 3.1 machines and built up a whole lot of data on their boxes between the original release and even up to a year or two after Windows 95 was released. Then when the time came to move to a new PC, remember how all of those users migrated their data from the Windows 3.1 box to Windows 95. They were very painstaking in their attention to detail with their precious data, lovingly learning about the file formats and required conversions and then running test migrations before committing to the moved data. And when some of them moved to Macintoshes when the iMacs came out, they were even very good about carrying their data and converting properly there too. Yes, I believe the Microsoft is right in thinking that they will have lifelong customers by 0wnz0ring their user's data and keeping them from using third rate products from competitors. The day and age of people wanting to try alternatives to the mainstream products, have come and gone. Everyone is perfectly happy with the products and services that MS gives them these days and really has no interest in alternatives like Firefox, Google, Mac OS X or Linux. So MS can say this with confidence since there will never be a day when their users might want to migrate their Windows Live data to another service.
Re:Cue the "window sucks" whiners (Score:3)
Re:Most students arent doing computer science (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong! Most students will not have an opinion until they experience it. Many will still not have an opinion after that.
"Most dont know or want to know what pop/smtp/imap are"
True, but they will find out the hard way that their e-mail service is lacking something that they can't name. At the latest, they will do so when they try to read their e-mail in some webcafé or similar place that only has a non-IE browser. They will also notice that a lot of their friends have a choice of mail clients, whereas they do not.
When I built an e-mail system for a business school, I was positively surprised by the amount of people who were actually knowledgable far beyond my expectations and they were really opinionated. Freedom of choice matters even among non-CS students. The CS students will of course be outraged and disgusted.
I think a remarkable amount of students will rely on gmail for their e-email.
Re:Most students arent doing computer science (Score:3)
And here I thought the purpose of school was to teach people not whore out their students to corporations.
Lets call spade a spade here. Schools just sold their students to MS. There is no other way to
Re:Windows Live Supports Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
I invited my non-tech friend to Gmail, and she used it as a second email account for a while. After trying out Windows Live Mail, she switched to Gmail on her main account, not liking the direction Hotmail was going.
Re:Benefits? (Score:3, Insightful)
The school for itself
Re:Give us the blacklist! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not only the personal inconvenience that's involved. Wouldn't you question the administration's ability to make sound decisions in other areas, based on their bad decisions in areas that are visible. Would you want to attend a college run by a bunch of yahoos?