Microsoft announced today that after June 30, 2009, Windows Live OneCare will be shut down, and that Microsoft is working on a new, free, small footprint anti-virus solution code-named “Morro”. Ina Fried at CNET News and others have been playing this as somewhat of a bold move by Microsoft, to somehow disrupt the market held by Symantec and McAfee by offering a free AV solution. I’m not so sure. From here, this looks much more ...

Good to see the Windows Live Wire blog start to focus on Wave 3, this time with a good post by Eric Doerr on Windows Live Movie Maker. If you’ve taken a look at Windows Live Movie Maker, you’ve no doubt noticed that it is, well, lacking. Eric explains in the post, however, that because of advances in the way that we create and use digital video, Microsoft decided to start over from scratch with ...

This week marked the unveiling of Windows Live Internet Services, news of a refreshed Windows Live Essentials beta coming soon, some new features (and some old ones) from Live Search, and lots of mobile news as well. Let’s recap: Windows Live Internet Services On Wednesday evening, Microsoft unveiled the online portion of Windows Live, which should be rolling out to users in the next “couple of weeks”. Lots and lots of changes and new stuff: ...

Windows Live is set to take a much more prominent role with Windows 7, as Microsoft made it official today that Mail, Photo Gallery, and Movie Maker are being removed from the operating system, to be replaced by the free Windows Live services. Of course if you’ve been reading LiveSide, we’ve been telling you that since at least last March. Then in June, Bill Gates hinted that Movie Maker “is Windows Live, now”, and Mary ...

Even though we’re not at PubCon, we’re loving Twitter Search, as it’s bringing us some great tidbits from the Live Search announcements from Satya Nadella’s keynote. A number of new features are being rolled out, including the addition of TV shows added to Live Search Video, and Bird’s Eye imagery included in image searches: The Live Search Video home page features TV shows from MSN Video on Hulu: Images has also received an update: the ...

As just announced at PubCon, and now posted on Dev.Live.com, Live Search has released a “new generation of search engine API”. Dubbed “Project Silk Road” the new version offers new interfaces through JSON, and XML over HTTP, in addition to the previously supported SOAP interface. The new API set is now strongly typed, and offers access to 7 result types (web, news, images, phonebook, spell-checker, related queries, and Encarta instant answer). In addition, Live Search ...

We had a chance to talk to Windows Live General Manager Brian Hall about this “major release” of Windows Live. In the first part, Brian goes over some of the major changes and new features we’ll soon see, talks about the timing of the release, introduces Windows Live Sync (coming first in Windows Live Photo Gallery), and touches on some of the issues surrounding the recent Hotmail upgrade. Here’s the video, and I’ll recap the ...

So far, Windows Live has meant what’s now called Windows Live Essentials, the suite of downloadable software (Live Mail, Writer, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker) for a while now, since the Wave 3 beta opened up in September. But the desktop downloads are only half of Windows Live, and now for the first time we’re about to get our hands on the online bits: Profile, People, Photos, Home.Live.com, and more. Like the Essentials suite of desktop ...

We’ve been waiting a long time for this: tonight Microsoft and Windows Live are announcing a major release of their Internet Services, what we’re calling the first “feature complete” version of Windows Live. This is big news for Windows Live fans, and LiveSide will have a number of posts in the next few hours detailing the many facets of the announcement, including a video interview and demo from our new favorite Windows Live guy, General ...

The Wall Street Journal is reporting tonight that Microsoft is “moving closer to an agreement with Verizon Wireless to become the default search provider on the wireless carrier's cellphones” according to a Reuters report. Microsoft would reportedly share revenue with ads shown on cellphone web searches, with payments to Verizon guaranteed for somewhere around $550 to $650 million dollars in the next five years. Google is thought to have offered about half that amount, according ...

Windows Live Hotmail is in the process of completing the rollout to Wave 3 “by the end of this week”, according to a blog post on Windows Live Wire. The post acknowledges the flood of comments that have surrounded the upgrade, and notes that the service has been changed because of them, saying “we have read and analyzed several thousand comments, fixed several bugs, and released five updates to the code”. The post goes on ...

I actually got Live Mesh for Mobile installed during PDC, but as you may know there were some early problems with the initial build, and so I wasn’t able to get it running until literally I was just about to get on a plane and head back to Seattle. But now that it’s running, Live Mesh for Mobile (running currently as a very limited beta, for Windows Mobile 6 devices) has the potential to be ...

While the Professional Developer’s Conference has traditionally been associated with the operating system it introduces, make no mistake: This is the Ray Ozzie PDC. Windows 7 made for a nice bit of eye candy after the ethereal and hard to grasp announcements around Windows Azure on Monday, but in the long run this PDC will not be remembered for a set of bug fixes and performance improvements to an unfinished Windows Vista. Ray Ozzie was ...

After today’s keynote, LiveSide, along with a small group of bloggers including Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror, Steve Gillmor of TechCrunchIT, Long Zheng, and some others that unfortunately I missed getting their names, were lucky enough to be invited to sit in with Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia, and Amitabh Srivastava, and talk a bit about today’s news and the future of software + services. We went around the room and introduced ourselves, and Jeff Atwood ...

After today’s keynote, LiveSide, along with a small group of bloggers including Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror, Steve Gillmor of TechCrunchIT, Long Zheng, and some others that unfortunately I missed getting their names, were lucky enough to be invited to sit in with Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia, and Amitabh Srivastava, and talk a bit about today’s news and the future of software + services. We went around the room and introduced ourselves, and Jeff Atwood ...

Just spent the morning listening to Ray Ozzie and company unveil Windows Azure, a combination of Amazon EC2 type hosted services, Microsoft Online Services, and tools to hook them all together, sort of. While not really Windows Live centric, Microsoft is making a big bet on “the cloud”, and many of the same services that Microsoft runs Windows Live with will soon be open to developers, hobbyists, and enterprise to make use of. If you ...

Speaking today at a keynote for the DLA Piper Tech Summit, Ray Ozzie tuned up his cloud computing mantra in preparation for next week’s PDC, by talking about the potential for the internet to speed up software usability. In a question and answer session with Fortune magazine’s David Kilpatrick, Ozzie spoke about the changing nature of the internet:: Ozzie said that cloud computing has enormous potential to speed up data exchange, software development, collaboration, and ...

Well we’re through the first round of Wave 3 news, awaiting our next big push starting in a little more than a week from Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) in LA. We’ll be there, of course, and we’re going to attempt to join up with some of our friends and live-blog the keynotes, more about that later. In the meantime, we thought we’d take a quick look at where we stand now and what to ...

Is this for real? It started with an interesting comment on the Live Search blog by a Group Product Manager for Live Search, hinting at rebranding efforts to come: We're glad you like the product and we recognize that there is a brand issue across Windows Live. And we've been pretty upfront about that when we talk to customers and advertisers(http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/017296.html). We're working on fixing those issues so stay tuned. Thanks for the feedback . ...

A bit of marketing fluff, to be sure, but if you want to show off your inner geekiness, Windows Live Messenger is emailing users today with a download link to an “I’m a PC” theme. If you haven’t already received the email, you can download the theme pack, or check out the I’m a PC website.