Microsoft Ships Public Beta of Windows Live Suite

at least the Windows Live Web 2.0 components beat the sh*t out of Apple's craptastic .Mac and iWeb.

what does Apple have for Web 2.0 again??? oh, ya - iGoogle!

what a laugh!

XP

Finally, everything anyone would need in one place!

"I hope that the Live services start to become a little more integrated"

the applications they're integrating with this launch "wave" seems to target several of the online services, namely Soapbox, Spaces, Skydrive, and Hotmail (and it's related services, ie. Live Contacts, etc.), of course.

the other online services don't seem to have had a lot of work done to them recently though. Product Search and Expo would be good if they were offered internationally, and they might even give eBay a run for their money. SharedView seems to fill a small niche presented by those users that feel a need to use something other than Remote Assistance (or for business users: Windows Meeting Space, Office Groove, Office Communicator, or SharePoint technologies) to collaborate. Tafiti makes a great online research tool though, and should be brought into the official Windows Live Search fold. these and the rest of the services should be considered secondary until they can fully release the initial lot though.

an x64 beta will be announced later for testing, closer to the actual release. according to MVP's in the forums, Vista x64 support is supposedly going to be included in the release versions or shortly thereafter. they are not waiting for a "2.0" release ala OneCare to release x64 compatible versions. this is just a beta build though, and they want to target as many users as possible for now, which happens to be 32-bit users.

XP

I hope that the Live services start to become a little more integrated, and this installer is a good start. I really like Live services (the Windows Live Hotmail client is quite nice, since I actually prefer a fat client, but also want to have things synced on several computers). But installing them was always a chore, so this fills an important gap.

i like the fact that the web form actually sets up the applications for the installer to download, before you download the installer, in essence, creating a custom installer for each user.

XP