If you are using MySpace, here is a short walk-through for how to enable this feature in Windows Live.

Overall, this implementation isn't very exciting, but while both MySpace and Windows Live aren't generally considered to be the most cutting-edge services by the digerati anymore (and MySpace is clearly on a downwards trend), there can be no doubt that they both command a large share of their respective markets. This cooperation between Microsoft and MySpace should also give the activitystrea.ms standard a good boost.

In last week's launch announcement, Bing was being bandied about as Microsoft's latest attempt to steal market share away from Google. In particular, according to Microsoft, Bing will focus on four verticals: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition, and finding a local business. We took the new search engine for a test run tonight.

In any case, a search for our current topic de jour, "web 3.0", brought up fairly similar results for Google and Bing. Although, frankly, we found that Google's Universal Search, which mixes different types of results together in one page (such as video in the example below), gave us a better search experience here. In Bing, you have to click 'Videos' to get multimedia about Web 3.0.

Bing - "web 3.0"

Google - "web 3.0"

How about testing one of the four areas in which Bing is supposed to be focusing? Let's pick 'searching for a health condition'. My favorite search is for "diabetes type 1", so I keyed that into both search engines:

Bing - "diabetes type 1"

Google - "diabetes type 1"

The main difference between the two search engines is that Bing offers more options on the left, including special sections for symptons, medication, children, etc. It also offers 'related searches', which is typically helpful with health-related searches.

As usual, Google offers a straight list of results, but again with Universal Search (in this case news and video results inline with normal webpage results). With Google you can get more options, but you have to click "Show Options..." - and we're not sure how many users will do this. To be honest, I haven't once clicked it in my daily Google searches since it went live a couple of weeks ago.

So, Microsoft's Bing does hold promise in this type of search. Maybe it's not all hot air after all...

Windows Live users will also soon be able to aggregate updates from MySpace, though according to Microsoft, this integration is still a few months off.

Just like before, your friends will be able to see your updates from these services on their Windows Live home pages, though your friends can also opt-out of your updates, or updates from select services. If you are a prolific digger, for example, your friends can choose not to see an update for every single story you dugg.

If you have a Windows Live account, this link will take you to a page with all the new web activities you can now import. As usual, Microsoft is rolling these updates out slowly, so your account may not feature these new services just yet.

Functionally, the biggest update to Windows Live is that users can now easily invite friends on other social networks into their Windows Live network (and vice versa).

Web IM for Hotmail

In addition, Microsoft also released Web IM for Hotmail today in a number of countries, including the U.S., Canada, Germany, and Brazil.

Looks Like This Strategy is Working for Windows Live

In many ways, this update makes Windows Live into even more of a mainstream version of the current non-beta, non-real-time version of FriendFeed. You can easily aggregate most of your online activity and your friends can easily follow all of your updates on their Windows Live accounts.

According to both Compete and Quantcast, Windows Live has seen its traffic grow rapidly since it updated its services last November, and the addition of these new web activities will surely not hurt the site's traffic.

Web Trends

New MySpace Profiles: Granular Privacy, W3C Compliance

MySpace launched "Profile version 2.0" late this week and a number of the changes are quite significant. The two biggest in our minds are the ability to set different privacy controls for different parts of a user's profile and the near complete adherence to W3C HTML standards. As MySpace develops, so develop the next generation of mainstream web users and thus the web at large. Whether you're a MySpace user or not, it's worthwhile to keep an eye on what the company is doing - especially in terms of user experience.

Google Flu Trends: A Glimpse into the Future of Google Health

It stands to reason that people who are "starting to come down with something" often take the opportunity to search for information on what ails them, even before they discuss their symptoms with a healthcare professional. Who gets more of those searches than anyone? Google, of course. When Google started looking more closely at anonymous aggregate searches for "flu symptoms" and the like, they discovered that - after cross-referencing that data against information from the Center for Disease Control - they had the ability to predict flu outbreaks by monitoring search patterns. And now, they've published their findings as Google Flu Trends.

Would You Manage Your Money Through The Newspaper?

Wesabe and the UK Telegraph think you might. Online money management service Wesabe and the UK newspaper giant The Telegraph have entered a partnership to offer co-branded tools on the Telegraph website. It's a daring move, we can't help but admire it. We also can't help but wonder how users will feel about it though.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
• WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• Glue enables you to connect with friends while browsing.
• Strands provides real-time recommendations of products.
• Direct Media Exchange is a solution for managing ad networks.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• SmartyPig is Simple. Smart. Savings.
• Quintura is a visual-based search engine.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

RWW Jobwire

Sam Whitmore on Vivian Schiller Leaving NYT to Become New NPR CEO

What do you get when you move the head of digital media at one of the world's leading old-school press outfits into the CEO's office of an even hipper large music and news organization? We don't know, but we're excited to find out! Veteran media exec Vivian Schiller announced this week that she's leaving her position as head of NYTimes.com to become the new CEO of National Public Radio (NPR).

We're excited about it from a technology perspective, but media industry analyst and RWW Jobwire guest editor Sam Whitmore discussed the move in terms of what it means for the Times as a business as well below.

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RWW Live: Online Tools for Career Discovery & Job Searching

We recently launched a new product, Jobwire, to track who has been hired for new jobs in tech and new media. In this week's episode of RWW Live, we talked about the state of online tools for career discovery and job searching. We had executives from Path 101, Indeed and Simply Hired join us for a lively discussion.

Download MP3

Web Products

First Look at Blue Spruce, IBM's Next Generation Browser Platform

IBM is about to commit itself heavily to browser-based applications. The giant IT company is quietly working on a project called Blue Spruce, which aims to create a fully browser-based application development platform. ReadWriteWeb was given an exclusive first look at Blue Spruce. Last week at Web 2.0 Summit we sat down with IBM's VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, Rod Smith, for a "show and tell" of what IBM claims will be the next evolution of the browser. What's more, it's fully open standards based - so it is squarely aimed at challenging the proprietary rich internet platforms of Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's Flash.

Microsoft Releases Major Update to Windows Live: New Applications and Third-Party Integration

Microsoft announced this week a number of new and updated online applications in its Windows Live suite: Windows Live Photos, Profiles, People, and Groups. In addition, Microsoft also announced that it will allow its users to integrate content from a large number of third-party services, including Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora, Photobucket, StumbleUpon, TripIt, Twitter, and Yelp. Microsoft will begin rolling out these new services to U.S. customers in the coming weeks and expects them to be available globally in 54 countries by early 2009.

See also: Microsoft's New Photo Sharing Service: Live Photos and New Profiles Turn Windows Live Into a Social Networking Service

OrbLive iPhone App Streams Live TV Over 3G

In the past, any iPhone apps that streamed live video were restricted by Apple. The apps could only use Wi-Fi or EDGE, and not AT&T's 3G network, if they wanted App Store approval. This week, though, Apple approved an app that streams live TV over Wi-Fi, AT&T's EDGE and 3G connections. The updated version of OrbLive for iPhone which was previously Wi-Fi/EDGE only, now allows for the streaming of live TV, videos, music, and photos from your home PC to your iPhone over the 3G network.

Google Launches Video and Voice Chat for Gmail

Google announced this week a major update for Gmail: video and voice chat. To make this work, users only have to install a small browser plugin. Google will start enabling these new features for all Gmail and Google Apps users at 12pm PST today. As is typical for new releases in Gmail, Google will roll this feature out to all users over the "next day or so." The new chat functionality will work on PCs with Windows XP or Vista, as well as on Macs with OS X 10.4 or later. The plugin will work with all the major browsers, including Google's own Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

Happy Birthday Firefox

One month after their preview release was downloaded by over eight million people in October 2004, the Mozilla Foundation announced the release of Firefox 1.0 on November 9, making it Firefox's 4th birthday this week. As the world's second most popular browser, and with their recent milestone of reaching 20 percent worldwide market share, the folks over at Mozilla certainly have some celebrating to do.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

RWW Enterprise Channel

Google Maps Now Available For Blackberry Enterprise Server Distribution

The iPhone may have outsold RIM's Blackberry devices in the U.S., but Google knows that getting their software in the hands of business execs still means building Blackberry apps. The company's recent offering in this arena is a new, deployable package of Google Maps for Mobile which IT admins can distribute using Blackberry Enterprise Server.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Windows Live Photos: This is one of the most interesting new applications, and we will publish a more in-depth review of it a little bit later tonight. Basically, this is Microsoft's answer to Yahoo's Flickr and Google's Picasa Web Albums.

Live Photos allows you to share your pictures with granular privacy controls, and thanks to the "What's New" feed, the new Live Photos service will also allow you to monitor the photos of your friends on Windows Live.

Windows Live Profiles: The new Live Profile aggregates and displays your activity on Windows Live and third-party services. Somewhat similar to FriendFeed, users can choose to aggregate their activities on other services like Yelp or Twitter on this profile page as well. In the next few months, Microsoft will also integrate a large number of other third-party services, including LiveJournal, Digg, Last.fm, iLike, Seesmic, and SlideShare.

One of the highlights of the new profile is that it includes extremely granular privacy controls.

These profiles, together with the updated Windows Live Groups, are the hub of Microsoft's social networking strategy around Windows Live.

Windows Live People: This is the central address book for all Windows Live services. It integrates directly with your Hotmail contacts and it will also allow you to invite your contacts from third-party services like LinkedIn (with more to be added later). Here, you can also organize your contacts into categories, and chat with them directly through the Windows Live Messenger for the Web.

Windows Live FrameIt: This is an interesting new service which allows you to to send photos and other content such as news or traffic information to digital picture frames. So far, Microsoft has not announced a lot of details about it, but we know that the hardware partners include Navteq, ViewSonic, and RMI.

Updated Services

Windows Live Groups: As rumored, Microsoft will also update MSN Groups and replace it with the new Windows Live Groups. These groups are tightly integrated with the other Live services, including the revamped Live Calendar, Live Photos, and SkyDrive.

SkyDrive: Microsoft's online storage solution has been upgraded from 5GB to 25GB.

Mobile

Microsoft is also releasing mobile versions of these new and updated services that should work on any mobile web browser.

This is Big

Overall, these new services represent a major upgrade to the online part of the Windows Live suite. Microsoft is clearly trying to challenge both Yahoo and Google with its new photo application, while the new profiles and groups tie all the Live services together into a very sophisticated social network.

According to Microsoft's PR materials about this release, its main mission in designing these new services was to give users a better way to manage their digital lives. Judging from what we have seen so far, Microsoft has definitely succeeded in creating a compelling set of applications that, thanks to its tight integration with Microsoft's desktop applications, will surely drive a lot of new users to Windows Live.

But all of that could be changing with today's announcement from Microsoft. Anointing OpenID "the de facto standard Web protocol for user authentication," Microsoft has moved to give millions of Windows Live users access to any OpenID-enabled site on the Web by ensuring every Windows Live ID will become an OpenID.

"We look forward to making it easier for our users to access the Web sites they use, by reducing their need to create additional identity accounts. That is the promise of OpenID. We are happy to support that goal by providing OpenID-based sign-in functionality to Windows Live ID account holders."

Clearly, this is huge vote of confidence for OpenID.

"It's a big deal for OpenID because we're seeing Microsoft ship code," said Scott Kveton, chair of the OpenID Foundation. "This is Microsoft putting their money where their mouth is. And it's due in no small part to Mike Jones, who has been working diligently to promote OpenID within Microsoft. I'm enormously excited to see this happening."

Test Driving the OpenID Functionality

The Windows Live implementation is still in testing. Those interested in participating can visit https://signup.live-int.com/ to set up a Windows Live ID test account and then visit https://login.live-int.com/beta/ManageOpenID.srf to set up an OpenID test alias.

Once these steps are complete, users can begin testing the Windows Live ID on any site that supports OpenID 2.0, developers can test libraries against the Windows Live ID OP endpoint, and site owners can test the Windows Live ID OpenID alias.

Tipping Point for OpenID?

While a number of the major players - AOL, Google, and Yahoo! to name a few - have continued to verbally support the efficacy of OpenID, implementation of the technology to put OpenID into practice has been less evident.

This move by a traditionally proprietary organization like Microsoft could be the signal that gives the market - both large and small players combined - the confidence to invest more time and energy into the widespread adoption of OpenID.

That is good news for OpenID proponents. And it's equally good news for all of us who are interested in simplifying the management of our identity across the multitude of sites we use on a day-to-day basis.

LiveSide has just discovered this page on Microsoft's Live Mesh site, which reveals that the Mac version is now ready for download. It reads:

An early look at Live Mesh for Mac

The Live Mesh puts you at the center of your digital world by connecting your devices over the internet - and now, you can add your Mac to your Live Mesh! It's never been easier to synchronize all your important Microsoft Office documents, media files, and pictures between your computers or between friends.

Since the launch of Live Mesh, many people have been asking for a Live Mesh extender for the Mac and while it's still under development, here is an early preview of our Mac extender. With the Live Mesh Mac extender, you can

• Add your Mac to your Live Mesh - it will appear with your other devices on www.mesh.com and throughout the Live Mesh UI.
• Synchronize files between your Mac, your other computers, and your Live Desktop.
• Synchronize folder contents between your Mac and other folder members.
• Easily access Live Mesh news, your Live Desktop, and manage your devices from the Live Mesh menu bar item.
• Receive notifications through Live Mesh when updates are available and easily update the Live Mesh extender for Mac.

A word of caution!
Please keep in mind that the Live Mesh extender for Mac is still under development, and due to overwhelming enthusiasm, we're making it available earlier than usual. Like many software projects, we started our Mac development efforts with the basic technology and scenarios. We started by making our synchronization engine and operating environment work on the Mac and starting to sync file between computers and members.

Over the next few months, we'll be working on updating the user experience and improving the Live Mesh experience and functionality, performance, and stability on the Mac. As such, please use at your own risk and remember to send us feedback.

What It Looks Like

The Mac version running on OS X, integrates Mesh into the Finder, with a Mesh sidebar next to the folder view. Like in the Windows version, you can share Meshified items with other users from this bar.Also like the Windows version, you can customize the settings to specify which items are synchronized with which devices. Here's what Mesh on Mac looks like:

Image Courtesy of LiveSide

Launch: January 2007
Death: June 24, 2008

Windows Live for TV was intended to be a plugin for Windows Live Spaces/Messenger that would bring enhanced functionality such as chat and voice conversations, PC-to-PC calls, and remote access to Windows Live Spaces all from your TV. Unfortunately, the service never made it out of beta stage. A program manager was quoted stating the following:

"The project was moved to a different organization internally in the spring of last year and will most likely not come out of beta."

Windows Live Expo

Launch: February 2006
Death: July 31, 2008

Windows Live Expo was the equivalent of Craigslist for Microsoft. I'm guessing not enough money was exchanging hands because now it too will join the "retired" list of Microsoft Live services. With this particular arena already dominated by Craigslist and Ebay one can see why. If you head to the site you'll see the following pop-up appear:

Live Search Books and Live Search Academics

Live Search Books
Launch: December 2006
Death: June 2008

Live Search Academic
Launch: April 2006
Death: June 2008

Live Search Books and Academic were intended to be a web search engines for books and scholarly literature. The services were in direct competition with Google Book Search and Google Scholarly. Search results for Live Search Academic came directly from trusted sources rather than crawling the internet relentlessly for results. In the end, there were over 750,000 books and 80 million journal articles scanned and indexed. Unfortunately, we can't compare it to Google because Google has not released their data. However, Google has noted that they scan more than 3,000 books per day into their database.

Taking On Too Much?

Has Microsoft taken on too much or are users just tired of there same old tricks? When Microsoft branded their old services with the "Live" image, they also released a ton of new services. As you can see, a considerable amount are already dying off. On the same note, most of these "new" services by Microsoft were very late comers in fields that were, and still are, dominated by others that have a strong hold on their respective markets. These are also markets that users have already associated with one company and Microsoft wasn't bringing anything revolutionary nor groundbreaking to the table in order to break grounds. This seems to be a repeating pattern with Microsoft when it comes to their web products. It's a small wonder why their services are dying off. Which one will be next?

Where is Windows Live at?

We last spoke to Hall in June '07 when the second generation of Windows Live launched. At that point there was a lot of confusion about the Windows Live brand - we noted that it was "still a fragmented vision, with a few too many products". So I started off by asking Brian for an update on Windows Live and what the brand means nowadays. He explained that Windows Live is about people sharing and getting to "their stuff". There are 3 parts to Windows Live, said Brian:

• Hosted services
• Peer to Peer
• Platform

Among the 'hosted services' layer there are products such as SkyDrive, which went beta last June. They also have Foldershare, a product that Microsoft acquired in 2005 that does P2P and remote tunneling for files.

Differences between Windows Live and Live Mesh

My next question was: how is the Live Mesh platform different to Windows Live? And where will the points of integration be? Hall said that Mesh is "a ground-up platform approach", whereby apps and community are programatically integrated into other apps. So in the longer run, Microsoft plans to integrate the 3 Windows Live layers (hosted, P2P, platform) into one seamless experience, using the Mesh platform.

It still is a little confusing, but Brian Hall is the first to recognize that they have a lot of work to do. He told me that the current Live Mesh UI is a "proof of concept" at this point, but over time aspects of it will be integrated into Windows Live.

Live Mesh concept illustration; source: Microsoft

So over time, we will see Live Mesh become integrated into Windows Live products. Brian Hall said it's unclear yet how that will play out, but for example we can expect SkyDrive (Microsoft's online storage product) to utilize Live Mesh technology to enable better syncing across desktop and Web, and among different devices. Also the sharing features of Live Mesh will become integrated into various Windows Live products.

The gist of the conversation was that Live Mesh is a platform and so in future we will see Windows Live products utilize that platform for syncing and sharing.

What's next for Windows Live?

As for Windows Live development, which Brian Hall is in charge of, he told us that we can expect to see new beta products in late summer / early fall. He also said that Microsoft is working on partnerships with social networks. At the end of March Microsoft announced the Windows Live Contacts API, enabling users to import and export their contacts and relationships from Windows Live to five popular social networks: Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, LinkedIn and Tagged. Microsoft also introduced a new website, www.invite2messenger.net, where people can invite their contacts from any of those five social networks to join them on Windows Live Messenger. We can expect more of that kind of data sharing functionality to emerge.

We can also expect to see further integration of Windows Live features into the MSN line of products - for example making user and community content more a part of the MSN news portal, via RSS, online video, social networking, and more. Hall used the word "intermingling" to describe how Windows Live products will integrate with MSN. The broad plan here seems to be to continue the MSN brand, but make it more personalized and social using Windows Live functionality. I would compare this to how the Yahoo homepage is evolving to become more like MyYahoo. Indeed, if Yahoo is acquired by Microsoft then Mesh technology merged with Yahoo content properties will be an exciting prospect!

Conclusion

Overall, there is still brand confusion in all of this - Live Mesh, Windows Live, MSN. But Microsoft is definitely tackling the Web in a big way, and the sync and sharing platform of Mesh is a key move by Microsoft to hook their desktop and Windows software advantage into the Web world.

Please tell us your thoughts on Mesh and Windows Live in the comments.

Though a price point has yet to be set, so it remains unclear whether Albany will offer an significant savings over purchasing its components separately, it is significant for two reasons. First, it adds a wrapper around each of its compotents that automatically sets them up for consumers in just a couple of clicks. The wrapper acts as a launcher for the various pieces of Albany, which includes office, productivity, messaging, and security software, and also keeps the compontents up to date.

Second, Albany will be offered as a subscription service, and users will be entitled to automatic upgrades for the duration of their subsciption contract. It's not quite a web app, but it does take a page out of the web app play book by going the subscription route -- a direction that Microsoft is known to be heading.

While Albany, which will get a new name for before a launch tentatively scheduled for later this year, is not as compelling as the true online office web application that we've all be waiting and hoping for, it is still a shot at Google's online office offerings. Clearly, this is a consumer play for Microsoft, and Google's office suite is not ready for the enterprise (see also here from Zimbra and here from Microsoft).

Even though Albany won't be a true web office offering, it is a likely low-cost alternative to Google Docs that lives on a user's PC -- something that is still more comfortable and familiar to many mainstream users -- is all inclusive, and ties into Microsoft online services. We still hope that Microsoft eventually bites the bullet and releases an RIA version of Office that exists in the cloud, but Albany is a smart consumer offering in the meantime that may stem the flow of users jumping ship for free online alternatives by making things easier, more tightly integrated to the online Live product family, and potentially cheaper.

Products, Products, Products

Let's take a closer look at exactly what was announced...

This year Gates' keynote mentioned the following products:

• Vista - according to Gates, Microsoft has sold more than 100 million Windows Vista licenses to date.
• IPTV (Internet TV) - British Telecom, TNT and CNN have developed apps for Microsoft Mediaroom Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) platform; e.g. TNT has enabled users "to view NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races from the driver’s vantage point by choosing from a series of in-car cameras". CNN is also doing an app for the US presidential elections. Microsoft says Mediaroom is running on 1 million set-top boxes worldwide. It also announced a new offering called DVR Anywhere, allowing users to watch their recorded programs on multiple TVs in the home, and a partnership with Samsung for HD content streaming from TV to PC.
• XBox (see below)
• Zune - since the November launch of Zune Social, currently in beta, Microsoft says that "more than 1.5 million people have joined the music-focused social network", which it says is proof that "Zune is tapping into consumers’ desire to share their musical passions with their broader community." However, Zune is clearly well below sales of the iPod - so probably not too much can be read into this. It is though encouraging to see Microsoft trying to extend online music experience past the 'closed shop' of iTunes; that may compel Apple to open up their iTunes platform a little more (we can only hope!).
• a new GPS-powered version of Tellme, Microsoft’s "voice-and-visual mobile service" that enables people to use voice commands on their phone as input, then receive output back visually on their phone screen. The example given was that "a person can “call” the Web on a mobile phone and say “movies” and the software will recognize where the person is located and send to that mobile phone’s screen a list of the theaters closest to that location."
• the Surface touch-screen computer; it's UI was Gates' main focus, but he also showed how Surface can send images directly to its social network product, Windows Live Spaces. Gates told the BBC that "in five years we'll have many tens of million of people sitting browsing their photos, browsing their music, organising their lives using this type of touch interface."
• Voice-activated technology for the car; including Sync, an "in-car communications and infotainment system for mobile phones and digital music players that has been available in select Ford models since September."
• 3D mapping - according to Webware "Gates predicts 3D environments will go with you: In the store, on the street, and so on. Devices will, of course, know your location."
• Windows Live users: 420 million worldwide

Digital dream becomes reality: Gates and Robbie Bach jam with Slash; photo by jidnet

Partnerships: NBC, ABC, Disney, MGM

As is now customary with Microsoft, there were a lot of partnerships announced with big media and electronics companies.

The most notable is a deal with NBC on an Olympics '08 website built with Silverlight technology - Microsoft's cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering online video. The site will host more than 3,000 hours of live and on-demand video of Olympic events. It will be ad-supported, with Microsoft and NBC sharing revenue. The site will be at NBCOlympics.com on MSN; and it's being touted as "the official U.S. online home of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing." Users will be able to get custom feeds of just the events they're interested in.

Another big partnership was with ABC and Disney Channel, for their programs to appear on Xbox Live Video. In other 'big media' action, Microsoft partnered with MGM to bring the latter's movies to Xbox LIVE. Both of these partnerships aim to bolster Microsoft's Internet TV ambitions for Xbox 360. Already Microsoft claims more than 10 million Xbox LIVE members, so the content deals will undoubtedly make the Xbox 360 platform more attractive - especially as they are high-definition. The company boasted that it will have twice the on-demand content than any cable or satellite provider. Clearly Microsoft is targeting Apple TV, although Xbox 360 is also fighting a double front - with Sony in gaming. Xbox 360 registered 17.7 million consoles this holiday season, more than Microsoft expected.

Conclusion

Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet remarked that this year's Gates keynote was less futuristic. I actually see that as a good thing, because it means we're seeing more actual products and services. Sure, we heard the usual talk about Windows software "connecting people", enabling rich UIs, device integration, and so on. But the number of real living products on display, and the equally impressive roster of big company partnerships, shows that Microsoft is delivering circa 2008. Although you could also fairly argue that Vista is still far from a success story and Zune is the poor cousin of the iPod still. Not to mention the Windows Live branding debacle.

Overall though, Microsoft's attack on the Internet front is paying off - particularly with Xbox 360 and its various Internet TV initiatives. Mobile is starting to look stronger too, with leaked info about Windows Mobile 7 showing support for an iPhone-like gesture interface. And Gates said in his keynote that Windows Mobile got "over 10 million new users last year, and we'll double that next year."

Microsoft is talking the talk, after years of the futuristic fridge taking center stage. Now, a Web-enabled fridge that plays Xbox games while sharing music with the Zune - that would be something...

Top photo: Joakim Baage