Microsoft zaps Hotmail in favor of Gmailesque Outlook.com

It looks like Hotmail will very soon be a thing of the past. MS has decided to rename the service Outlook, and at the same time give it a facelift and do away with the most annoying feature; the picture ads on the right edge of the interface. It is yet another innovation for MS this year, where SkyDrive (becoming a personal favorite of mine) gets better Web App equivalents to MS Office, and incorporates a slicker Google Drive style approach to free storage and document sharing.

I have had the sneaking suspicion over the last few months (starting with Windows Phone 7.5) that Microsoft has finally discovered the movement to mobile and apps-based computing. This is just another step in the company creating a series of online applications that are becoming increasingly consistent and unified with the MS desktop presence. Will they out-Google Google in this area? It remains to be seen, with a lot riding on the acceptance of Windows 8 and the Surface tablet, both of which will be released this Fall.

Now the next question is when MS will introduce apps for iPad, OSX, and Android devices that are consistent with the functionality of the browser-based experience. This would create a complete package that could be the best available.

Dealing with students who are still using MS Works.

I guess Works still comes on some computers. I had a student call earlier saying that they needed to submit a paper to an instructor in Word format. All they had to work with was Works, which never has had Word support for some strange reason (perhaps to differentiate it from Word?) or any common format but RTF. My first thought was to have them download Abiword or LibreOffice, or perhaps log into Google Drive, but then something else occurred to me. This is only one of many possible solutions obviously, but it did save having to download and install software, or navigating Google Drive.


If you have a Hotmail or Live.com account, then you already have a copy of Word, albeit a bit stripped down, available online. Logging into one of these gives you access to SkyDrive. While I am not going to extoll the features of this platform in detail here, it does have the advantage of hosting Office Web Apps.  Since this student already had a Hotmail account, I walked her through logging in, starting the Word Office Web App, and then copying and pasting her document from Works into the App. After this it was a simple matter of saving the document from the Word App and then downloading it. It saves in Word format.

There is absolutely no reason not ot expect students to submit items in specific formats anymore. With programs like AbiWord, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, and cloud platforms like Google Drive and MS Skydrive, everyone can have access to software that writes in mainstream formats. What is above is only one possible solution.

The true advantage to these options (other than being freely available), is that students can continue to work in MS Works at home if they are more comfortable doing so, and still be able to give you the format that you request when it comes time to submit the final product.

SkyDrive is interesting, but will it come together?

From what I have been reading, SkyDrive and LiveMesh are going to be tightly integrated into Windows 8. SkyDrive under different names has been around for several years. I have been playing around with the newest iteration of SkyDrive, Office Web Apps, desktop integration for Mac and Windows 7 boxes, and sharing.

There are some gotchas: you can't edit docs using Office Web Apps on an iPad, the Mac client only supports Lion, and the sharing via email addresses on the desktop clients does not seem to work for me. However if they get this better integrated with the release of Windows 8, then they will have a real competitor for Google Drive. Definitely worth checking out if you have Office, Windows, and need to access and edit files across multiple devices. My understanding is that MS may do away with Livemesh, or possibly incorporate it into SkyDrive.

There is a real opportunity here for MS to get this right, if all parties involved are speaking the same language and can come together to create a coherent product.

The real key to being able to present this as a viable alternative to Dropbox or Google Drive is to make all of the parts of SkyDrive work the same, provide a unified visual metaphor and uniform functionality across all platforms. If Office Web Apps worked on Android and iOS, or at least were available via web browser for instance, then the likelihood of the public adopting the platform would be greater. Further integration with the Windows Live Apps, such as Movie Maker would also help create the impression of a single integrated platform, something that Google has been struggling to do as well.

It will be very interesting to see how Windows 8 integrates with SkyDrive, and how the OS drives Skydrive to evolve.