Windows Live: Not Cooked Enough to Be a Beta

How many times have we heard the expressions “It is not cooked yet” or “What a half-baked idea” applied to new releases? Frankly, I am surprised at all the hoo hah and all the positive press for Microsoft’s Live beta. If you stick a toothpick into the center of Windows Live, you will find it is still liquid in the middle.

Windows Live should not have left the company’s labs for a litany of reasons – the biggest being not everyone uses Internet Explorer, Hotmail, and/or Outlook. If you are going to claim that you are entering into the web services business, you had better cater to all platform users, not just your signature product.

Yes, it is a beta, and as Microsoft says on the Windows Live site “Beta
is geekspeak for ‘not finished yet.’” However, I cannot help but compare it to Google Labs.

When Google first started its Labs beta program, I faithfully tried the news alerts and later, the maps. I tested the translation tools, even when the results were more comical than effective. Although they were not perfect, these tools were ready for prime time in the sense that under great scrutiny from the masses who tried them, they played well with all browsers and gave reasonable results the majority of the time. It is a decent beta program from which Google has graduated a healthy list of tools.

Google continues to play its cards well when it comes to beta releases and provides a high benchmark for such pretenders to the throne such as Microsoft’s Windows Live. It is transparent that with all the news Google has been making lately, Microsoft wants a piece of the media’s pie.

Here is a list of my top 10 complaints with this beta release: