RSSMicrosoft Sends Windows Live to College
By Ed Oswald | Published April 21, 2006, 5:18 PM
Microsoft is heading to college campuses to promote its Windows Live service in a new way -- by hosting college e-mail accounts. Called Windows Live@edu, 72 colleges worldwide have signed onto the service and discussions are ongoing with almost 200 more.
The e-mail service provides a familiar interface to many students as it is patterned after Hotmail. However, students do not receive a hotmail.com or msn.com e-mail address, as the accounts it carry the domain of their respective school.
The move is intended to promote the Windows Live suite of services, and also establish continuing loyalty. Although the Live services are traditionally advertiser supported, Live@edu accounts would not show ads to users while they are in school. Microsoft does, however, reserve the right to turn on the ads after they graduate.
The Redmond company believes that catching the students early on will turn them into life-long users of Windows Live. They would likely create a Windows Live Messenger account, start a blog and organize their favorites under this e-mail account -- especially if they plan to continue using it, Microsoft says.
Google recently announced a similar program for its Gmail service, serving students of San Jose City College in California. Microsoft touts its service as better, as it provides much more control to the IT administrator than Google's option.
Also, the infrastructure to provide the Live@edu is already present, which means there is little cost associated in offering it.
But although there has been a rapid uptake of the service, the company says it still meets resistance and skepticism. In return, Microsoft has been assuring education institutions that its only motivation is to get students using Windows Live, promising there are no ulterior plans.
If these colleges have any real technology type students it will go over like an old turd. What real computer type limits themselves to working with Microsoft products? Most are on a constant shuffle between operating systems and software on them. IE 6 is not available for all of them, such as Linux and BSD (not counting BSD based Mac OS).
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Somebody please save those poor souls!! ;-)
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where can i find the list of schools that has live.com?
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There's a daily updated statistics page for Office Live (total number of participating domain names) available at http://www.ipwalk.com/general/show_news/id/11
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Both Windows Live and LiveDrive(unlimited online storage) should go over very well at those campuses & dorms w/ Internet2... I may just re-enroll at Hacker U-- and become Svengali to all those former Lolitas...
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Oh... I see how it is:
"Although the Live services are traditionally advertiser supported, Live@edu accounts would not show ads to users while they are in school. Microsoft does, however, reserve the right to turn on the ads after they graduate."
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Well, This really isn't anything 'new'. Microsoft have been giving people the option to use their domain names as part of the hotmail/live mail service for sometime now.
You can sign up for free to use your own domain name over at domains.live.com.
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Yeah, but that's if you own and control the domain. The majority of college kids don't own their own domain names. So its not just switching you and your family and a couple of friends to hotmail, its switching thousands of people.
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Has anyone here tried the new live mail? It sucks, that is all I have to say. It's bloated, uses up so much screen space yet has no room to work. I have never seen a beta that was more like in pre alpha stages. But then again, using gmail for the last 6 months would make anything not like it seem like junk. The fact the college would allow them to use their students as mice is pretty sad. Ms is doing everything they can to get this new live thing to catch on but I am sure it will be the same dud as their reinventing msn search that was such a utter failure that actually made them loose a few points in search. I am waiting to see Ms try to buy Google because they are having such a hard time keeping them from destroying every business model they have, while Google is preventing them from even affecting their own only revenue stream.
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So Microsoft's implementation gives the the school more China-like control than Google's implementation.
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if they send it to college will it learn something?
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Hope it doesn't include Office Live, cuz that crap don't work.
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Absolutely brilliant marketing... very foul too as I would hate to be a college student that had no choice but to use Live@edu to get an e-mail address at my respective college.
Scary =)
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a good required-challenge to join a frat.
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