To those of you new to our blog, let me first say welcome! And for those of you who’ve been here before, it’s great to meet you. I’m Chris Jones and I lead the program management team for Windows Live. We’re hard at work on the next major release of Windows Live, and in the coming weeks and months we will be updating this blog with more details about the new features and design goals of our products.

Before we get to the future of Windows Live, I’d like to cover where we’ve been and where we are today. Our goal with Windows Live is to build a suite of software and services that help you get to your information from any device and keep up with the people you care about, using a variety of services. We recognized from the start that this journey would take several years to complete, and would require coordination across our products in a new way to bring them all together. As a result, we decided to plan and release updates to Windows Live in waves. A wave generally spans anywhere from a few months to more than a year and is a coordinated release of web-based services, PC software, and mobile experiences. Of course we regularly update our products throughout each wave, so you’ll often see new features show up, not just at the end of a wave.

Our first wave, completed in 2006, focused on bringing together several existing online services including Hotmail, Messenger, and Spaces – into a single Windows Live release.

Our next wave focused on creating a suite of PC software to enhance the Windows and Windows Mobile experiences, designed to work best when connected to our suite of web-based services. We brought the Photo Gallery and Mail applications for your PC into the Windows Live family and created a new blogging tool called Windows Live Writer, all part of a desktop suite. We also introduced a number of new web services including Events, SkyDrive, Calendar, and Family Safety. We released updates to Hotmail, Messenger, and Spaces and brought all of our web services together with a common header (a set of links at the top of the page) and a new home page (http://home.live.com). And finally we introduced Windows Live experiences for mobile phones including downloads for Windows Mobile devices and browser-based services for web-enabled mobile devices. This wave of releases completed in 2007.

We have spent the last year working on our next major wave of releases for Windows Live. This wave is part of our ongoing work to build a great set of communication and sharing experiences that help keep your life in sync. This wave includes significant updates to our software applications for your Windows PC, and in the next few hours, we will release public betas of the latest version of the Windows Live suite of PC applications, including Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Toolbar, and Family Safety. You’ll find new features across the products and most notably, Windows Live Messenger has been almost entirely redesigned. I’m sure many of you will have questions, and, over the coming weeks, we’ll have individuals from the engineering team share more about what we have built and why we made the investments we made. Our intent is to post regularly to this blog, and if there are topics you think we should cover, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail at chris.jones@microsoft.com.

One thing we know will be important to all of you will be the “feedback loop” - where you can offer suggestions and we take those suggestions and improve our products. We are avid users of Windows Live ourselves and we’re always combing blogs, newsgroups, and articles that are highlighting feedback and usage of Windows Live. We’ve enabled comments on these posts and our plan is to read and treat everything as input into our designs. We will also participate in the comments, but we can’t answer every single request. In addition to this blog, our products are all part of the Customer Experience Improvement Program, an anonymous, opt-in, and private mechanism whereby we can learn about how customers really use our products. We pay very close attention to this data and will talk more about it in posts in the future. You can help by opting in to share this information with us.

With that, I’ll sign off for now, and I look forward to continuing our discussion about Windows Live. I encourage you to download the new betas from http://download.live.com later today and start using them immediately so that you can enjoy the latest Windows Live enhancements. And of course, please send us your feedback as we’d love to hear what you think.

Chris

You can get translations of this blog in many languages through the Windows Live Translator service.