Windows Essentials

~ the last words ~

Every clean Windows install had a second install after it. You finished the drivers, you finished the updates, and then you went and got the bundle, because the machine as shipped could not edit a video or open your mail or sign you into the network where all your friends were. Microsoft had taken those out of Windows and put them behind a separate download, and for about ten years the separate download was as much a part of the ritual as the antivirus.

The name changed more than the contents did. It started as an installer Microsoft was shipping in 2007 to pull down the Windows Live apps in one pass, became Windows Live Essentials 2009 on 7 January 2009, then Essentials 2011 in September 2010, then Windows Essentials 2012 in August 2012 once Microsoft had decided the word Live was doing more harm than good.

I have set up more Windows machines than I can count, at home on TTNet and later at work, and the bundle was on every single one. The Messenger in it is the part that matters for anybody from Turkey. Between 2002 and 2010 MSN was not one chat option among several here, it was the chat, and the installer that put it on your desktop was this one.

~ the record ~

~ what came in the box ~

The 2009 release carried Photo Gallery, Mail, Writer, Messenger, Family Safety and a toolbar. The 2011 release added Movie Maker and Mesh and dropped the toolbar for the Bing Bar. The 2012 release settled on Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mail, Writer, Messenger and the OneDrive desktop client, having thrown Mesh out and pushed Family Safety into Windows itself.

Two of those did work nothing else did. Movie Maker was where an enormous number of people made their first edit, because it was free and already there and did not ask you to understand a timeline before it would let you drag a clip onto one. Live Writer was a desktop blog editor that spoke to whatever blog engine you ran, which is a category that essentially no longer exists, and it was good enough that people who hated everything else Microsoft made kept it installed.

~ the day it died ~

Microsoft announced the direction on 2 May 2012, before the last version had even shipped: Windows 8 would carry equivalents in the box and the suite would not be needed. Then very little happened for four and a half years. The bundle stayed downloadable and unsupported, quietly rotting, while the services under it moved. Mail lost the DeltaSync protocol it used to talk to Hotmail and had to be reconfigured onto IMAP or POP3 by anyone who wanted to keep it. Photo Gallery and Movie Maker lost their Facebook uploads when the API changed underneath them.

On 10 January 2017 the installer came off the download servers. Nothing was uninstalled and nothing stopped working. What ended was the ability to get it, which for a free bundle is the same thing as ending it. Messenger's own long execution finished a few months later, in April 2017, when Microsoft pushed the last of its users to Skype.

~ what got buried with it ~

Live Writer got out. Microsoft open-sourced the code and a community fork shipped as Open Live Writer on 9 December 2015, which is the only piece of this suite you can still legally download today. Movie Maker got a worse fate than deletion: with the official download gone and the name still famous, search results filled up with reuploads and paid impostors, and a fair number of people looking for a free Microsoft video editor in 2018 ended up installing something else entirely.

The strategy behind the retirement was correct and the accounting was still wrong. Windows 8 did come with a photo app and a mail app, and neither of them could do what the thing they replaced did. Photo Gallery had real cataloging and real editing. The tile that replaced it had a slideshow. Microsoft got a decade of goodwill out of shipping software that was better than it had to be, gave it away with the operating system, and then quietly took it back when the free version stopped fitting the strategy.

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