Microsoft releases updated Windows Live apps
Microsoft today is releasing the final version of its new set of Windows Live apps, including updates to its photo- and video-editing programs, as well as synching and blogging tools. — The Windows Live Essentials 2011 apps …
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a loop Microsoft opened in April 2010, when it was first reported prepping the next generation of Windows Live, and it extends a strategy dating back to the 2007 'software + services' repositioning, when Windows Live was reframed as desktop clients bound to Microsoft's cloud services rather than a standalone web portal. The 2009 addition of Facebook, MySpace, Digg and Last.fm as social network partners turned Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, and the sync and blogging tools into aggregation endpoints for other companies' social graphs.
The timing matters internally: this lands weeks before Microsoft's rumored October 11 Windows 7 phone unveiling, in the same season Ballmer's proxy filing showed his bonus halved over mobile-market struggles. Essentials is the cheap, high-reach layer of the Windows franchise — free apps that keep consumers anchored to Microsoft accounts and services across PC and, soon, phone.
First-order effects
- Windows users get final, no-charge updates to Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mail/Messenger-class synching and blogging tools, replacing whatever beta builds they had been running since the spring previews.
- Microsoft gains a refreshed consumer touchpoint on hundreds of millions of Windows PCs just before its mobile push — every synced machine is a funnel into Hotmail, SkyDrive-era services, and the social feeds of its 2009-vintage partner networks.
Second-order effects
- Free bundled photo- and video-editing squeezes paid consumer editors (the low end of Adobe's and Corel's markets) on price, since Movie Maker and Photo Gallery now ship with capabilities those vendors charge for — a classic instance of bundle pressure.
- Social-network partners like Facebook get deeper write-access from the desktop — uploads, tagging, and status flow through Live apps — which raises the switching cost of leaving Windows precisely where Apple's iLife suite competes hardest on the Mac side.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Microsoft's consumer software keeps migrating from licensed products to free, service-tethered utilities whose job is retention rather than revenue — making the OS-and-services account, not the app, the unit of competition among platform owners.
- That same logic sets up the mobile test: whether Essentials-style bundling can extend to phones will shape whether Microsoft remains a two-screen consumer platform or cedes that role entirely.
The trend: Consumer desktop software is being repriced from products into free bundles that tether users to a platform owner's cloud services and accounts, with the next battleground the connected phone.