30 November
start.com vs. live.com
a lot of folks have been asking me:
what's the difference between start.com and live.com... they look similiar and have similiar features, what's the point?
great question :) right now they look pretty similiar, but this is where we are headed (as soon as we staff up a bit)
start.com is an incubation project. start.com is where we'd like to try out new ideas and concepts. our target audience are the super tech-savvy folks, the mavens. once we see something is proven on start.com we may ship it to live.com.. we would also like start.com to be a place for brand new ideas that may have nothing to do with live.com but can spin off to new projects of their own. our vision is for start to be the place for trying things in an open manner, with a very tight feedback loop with our customers (this doesn't imply that customer feedback isn't important on live.com - it is. it's just that the feedback on live.com is in the thousands so we probably can't reply to each email ourselves). start.com is one where our engineers can just ship their ideas - with a light approval process, whereas with live we have a few more stakeholders :) in summary, I would like start to be start labs in the future - a place for a myriad of incubation ideas.
live.com is the homepage for windows live. this is where you'll be able to:
- take advantage of live services (as more of them become available) through gadgets
- the place to manage your web the way you want it. this can be a list of your favorite sites, gadgets of other services, feeds, etc...
- the best search experience (we realize we got a ways to go here :) )
- and many more cool thing that i'll save as surprises for now.
our target audience for live is much broader - we would like to empower the developers, enthusiasts and casual internet users.