Windows Live Home

» see home.live.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

MSN was the whole internet for people my age in Turkey through the 2000s. Everyone in university had Messenger open, everyone had a Hotmail address, and by the Windows Live rebrand most of us were on TTNet broadband and using both without thinking about it. Almost nobody went to home.live.com. You opened Messenger, or you went to your mail. This is the grave of the page Microsoft built for the step in between, the one the 330 million people it counted were mostly passing through rather than visiting.

Microsoft first showed it on 3 August 2007, at its Japan subsidiary's annual business strategy meeting, and had to clarify afterward that this was not going to be the replacement for Live.com. The finished version shipped on 15 October 2007. The launch feature people remembered was cosmetic: you set your location and it showed the current weather for it, and the page shifted color automatically as the day went on.

What it was supposed to do was hold everything else. Your unread Hotmail and your upcoming birthdays and flagged messages, a feed of what people in your network were doing across Windows Live Profile and Groups and SkyDrive and Messenger, your status message, MSN headlines, your online contacts with a web chat window attached. It also pulled activity from outside properties like Facebook and LinkedIn, which in 2008 was an unusually open thing for Microsoft to ship. It got the Wave 3 treatment on 2 December 2008 and Wave 4 on 7 June 2010, and in April 2010 Microsoft pointed live.com at it, the address that used to be Live Search before Live Search became Bing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the dashboard idea ~

The hub page was an article of faith across the whole industry for about a decade. My Yahoo had it, every ISP shipped one, and the reasoning was sound on paper: a person has mail and photos and contacts and a calendar scattered across a dozen properties, so give them one screen that summarizes all of it and they will start their session there every morning.

People did not do that. They went directly to the one thing they wanted. The portal home page survived as long as it did partly because browsers made it the default start page and partly because nobody had measured how little anybody chose it, and once analytics were good enough to answer the question, the answer was not good for Windows Live Home.

~ the inbox that replaced it ~

Microsoft started retiring the Windows Live brand in 2012 and introduced Outlook.com as the future of Hotmail. Outlook.com made one decision that ended this product without anyone needing to announce it: signing in takes you straight to your inbox. Nothing sits in front of it. There is mail, and everything else is a link in a menu.

The last Hotmail accounts finished migrating to the new interface in early May 2013, and at that point Windows Live Home was the front of nothing. Microsoft dates the end to that August. The address still answers, because home.live.com forwards to outlook.live.com, which means the URL survived the product by more than a decade and has been quietly delivering people to their mail ever since. Which is where they were trying to go in the first place.

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