OfficeLive: Microsoft Attacks

I have taken a look at Microsoft's latest revamping of its online services (Hotmail, MSN, etc) into what it now calls OfficeLive. It's billed as everything you need to promote and manage your business online—Web site, e-mail, online collaboration, sales and marketing tools, and more..

I reactivated my long dead hotmail account into a live.com email address (now with 5GB) and then created a linked OfficeLive account.


I was given a boilerplate website (with what Microsoft calls a "spicy" template -- brown really) with 500MB of space and a weird yourpick.industry.officelive.com url -- with the option to get your own domain -- first year free ($14.95 thereafter).

You can add up to 100 email addresses like some.dude@offiveliveusers.com (weird domain).

You even get a blog (they call it spaces) to enter your thoughts and tell your story. They have one for mobile hotmail users if you want to see what one looks like.

Definitely, you will not mistake the result of this whole mashup as being done by any other organization besides Microsoft. Do they sit around and vote on these sort of things like brown Zunes. It just is so bad in places -- but you can not ignore the fact that it is very advanced and Microsoft has definitely gotten more of its pieces in place. They are getting their act together and there is no denying they are on the attack (with Google in their sites) and this can only be good for us in terms of the services we get.

Watch this development and let's see what emerges from this.