BetaNews reported a few days ago...
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.
Selling themselves to schools is fine, but what I have a problem with is that the only browser the support is IE6, and they don't support POP, IMAP, or email forwarding. I mean this is just nothing but a MSTrap! I would think it's self-demeaning on MSFT's behalf, no?
I would have thought that by now people have started thinking that it's just not cool to use purely MSFT things and surrender any freedom of choice, I mean at least IT managers. And IMAP/POP allows you to use mail clients, and are such a huge step up from web-based email, as far as organising your mailbox/address book goes. That they refuse to let people do this really dirty business.
Anyway, thinking that targetting college is a way of catching students early might be naive: These days even the least technically savy HS student has an email address and probably uses some mail client.
I think, and hope, that this will be met with some resistance and displeasure by students. The computer/online life is, these days, such a huge part of our lives that it's crucial to educate oneself in this area, about the choices that exist and the advantages/disadvantages between them.
In the coming years our electronic lives will play a growing part in our human lives, and it's dangerous for everyone if this area is controlled by a single entity. There're even movies made about this sort of thing. We'll be living in a dictatorship, essentially.
Foremost I think it's important for governments to move to using information infrastructure that is not vended by a commercial party. Otherwise our governments themselves may come at the mercy of a commercial force.
One painless solution is for MSFT to be split up into a number of different corporations: one for IE; one for the OS; one for Office; etcetera. This would not even require the masses to learn something other than Windows, at the same time creating a less dangerous world.
