Live and kicking
It's easy to forget, with all the attention paid to the smartphone market these days, that Microsoft has been competing with Google and Apple in another market for even longer - web services.
The competition with Apple is indirect, as iLife comes bundled with every new Mac and Windows Live Essentials (WLE) only runs on Windows. But Apple asks even Mac-users to shell-out £71 ($79 in the States) for the latest version, while WLE appears to be completely free, so it could be viewed as one of the advantages Windows has over Mac OS.
The competition with Google, however, is very direct. Google is the king of giving stuff away online and then worrying about making money off the back of it later. Gmail is arguably more successful than Hotmail now and Google's many free geographical services set it apart. It has also been aggressively going after the Office cash-cow with Google Apps for some time now.
But Microsoft seems to be fully committed to changing its core philosophy (write a piece of software and charge people to use it), and taking on Google at its own game. A few weeks ago we got a preview of the new, improved Hotmail, and yesterday some initial information about Office Web Apps - the free, cloud-based versions of office that will be available next month - and Wave 4 of WLE.
There wasn't much though. For Office Web Apps, all we have so far is an internal interview with the lead project planner discussing, among other things, her hobbies. The WLE preview consists of the video below and, after a bit of digging, the bullet-points on the next page. Enjoy.
