Brands are very useful.

A brand is a name. That name creates a container in your brain that gives you a place to store associations, like "good" or "bad". Over time, these associations add up and help us make decisions. You hear the brand name and you immediately know how you feel about it, no need to think. Whether you like branding for business or not, this type of pattern recognition system is how our brain works.

Take "purplevision" for instance. When you hear the word "purplevision", what do you think? Things like "brilliant", "a masterpiece", "we are all going to die from global warming and its our own darn fault" probably came to mind, right? Such is the power of branding.

Leave it to Microsoft to use and abuse branding. Over and over again.

A few years back, Microsoft was accused of missing the internet. To recover from this obvious blunder, they did two things: first, they built Internet Explorer and gave it away to drive Netscape out of business. second, they performed a massive rebranding (renaming) effort of existing products with .NET.

"You think we missed the internet? Well we totally get the Internet now! You see, all our products are now called .NET. Internet. .NET. We totally get it!"

Visual C++ and their other tool software went from version 7 to version .NET. What is .NET? What does .NET mean? It's been over 5 years and I still dont know :)

Fast forward to today. It would seem that killing Netscape didnt put that pesky Internet thing behind them so now we have the next massive rebranding initiative from the hive mind in Redmond. LIVE.

Apparently people chose Google and Yahoo over MSN Search, or Messenger or Hotmail because they didnt know that they were. (I rather thought it was because they werent very good, or at least not any better than the competition but what do I know.) To fix this problem, these existing products as well a host of new products will now be rebranded as LIVE.

Live Search, Live Messenger, Live Mail, Live Mail Desktop, Live.com, Life Toolbar, Live OneCare, Live for Mobile, Live Local, and Live Expo. That's right, 12 new LIVE products, not including Xbox Live and Live Anywhere for gamers.

In contrast to Google or Yahoo, Microsoft has decided to drop their Microsoft name (one of the most well known brands on the planet) from their products and go with the really terrible brand, Live. Live? Im hard pressed to decide whether Live is better or worse than Nintendo's Wii but that is not a contest I would even want to be involved in.

Apparently the word "live" is supposed to have some association with the Internet although its not clear to me what that association is. Im also puzzled by the fact that Microsoft has 12 "Internet products" yet none of them provide software-as-a-service versions of Office or anything like that. All of these products either already existed or are blatant copies of products from Google, Apple and Yahoo. Wasnt that strategy of hiring only the smartest people supposed to lead to innovation and completely original products that OTHER people copied?

Time will tell if Live fares better than MSN. For my friends who work there, I hope so. In the mean time, it will be amusing to watch customers try to make sense of it all.

Driving the Windows Live initiative

By Benjamin J. Romano

Seattle Times technology reporter

Monday, June 19, 2006

read it here

The days of buying software in a shrink-wrapped box and loading it on your computer are waning, the prognosticators say. Now and in the future, ever more programs will be delivered as free services with data and functions residing in a "cloud" of dispersed servers accessible via the Internet from anywhere in the world. The cost to the user is targeted advertisements appearing next to search results and e-mails.

The consumer-focused portion of that effort is called Windows Live, a suite of services including search, communications and social networking. It will go head-to-head with some of the biggest names on the Internet, including MySpace, craigslist, Google and Yahoo!

As the summer progresses, more Windows Live services will be introduced to the public, beginning in the coming days with Microsoft's new instant-messaging program, a major piece of the puzzle.

So far, however, the company has struggled to clearly articulate Windows Live internally and externally.

"A lot of people from Microsoft read us to find out what the heck's going on," said Kip Kniskern, one of five contributors to LiveSide.net, a news site that tracks Microsoft's moves in this area.

A Microsoft employee staffing a Windows Live booth at a conference last week for technology professionals wrote in a blog, "After talking to about 25 customers, it was abundantly clear that customers have no idea at all what Windows Live is, or how it relates to Windows or MSN."

The Windows Live development effort has come at a blistering pace and a high cost.

...

Since last fall, Microsoft has increased employment in the business unit that includes Windows Live by some 35 percent, according to a report Rosoff published last month. The company expects to spend $1.1 billion on research and development in the fiscal year that starts July 1, more than double what it spent in the 2005 fiscal year.

Microsoft intends to recoup its investment by selling advertising on Windows Live that reaches hundreds of millions of users and is also targeted to an individual's specific behaviors.

For instance, if someone spends time searching the Internet for a wristwatch, advertisements from watchmakers might appear next to their e-mail.

"We want this sort of serendipitous experience where all of a sudden you feel like the network is on your side, that the services in the background are taking care of you," Sohn said.

For people who don't want data about their interests collected for this purpose, Sohn said the feature can be turned off, though Microsoft will still track basics such as age, gender and hours of Internet use.

It's not clear how much of the behavioral data collection will be opt-in — users have to affirm they want to participate — vs. opt out, in which participation is the default.