LiveSino has posted two interesting, albeit not surprising, articles with regards Windows Live Wave 4 over the past few days the first of which is about no support for Windows XP. This comes from a screenshot of the information users need to agree too before downloading the upcoming beta of the suite in which only Windows 7 and Windows Vista are mentioned.
Its not surprising that Wave 4 wont be supporting XP and its something that most people will agree is the best thing for Microsoft to do even if a fairly large percentage of people can’t use the suite. As Picturepan2 points out in the LiveSino article this follows the same tactic Microsoft are using with Internet Explorer 9 which will also be Windows 7 or Vista only. Wave 4 also looks like it will support 7 languages.
Interestingly Microsoft aren’t following this approach with products they sell to customers but so far only their free software, I wonder if other free software from Microsoft will also drop support for XP such as the Zune software which is likely to be updated by the end of the year. For any Microsoft user it’s certainly not a time that I would want to still be on XP.
The other piece of news to come from LiveSino was that Wave 4 Hotmail will feature Office Web Apps integration so users can access Word, Excel and PowerPoint within Hotmail. As LiveSide have pointed out in the latest post on Inside Windows Live it talks about 95% of the storage capacity of Hotmail being taken up with Microsoft Office documents that are attached to emails, it therefore makes sense to allow quick access to these files within Hotmail.
It makes a lot of sense to me to integrate Office Web Apps into Hotmail as if it wasn’t for Live Mesh I would probably be emailing documents to myself on a regular basis and I know that my family often do just that. I also know that my family mostly only want to print or read a document that they have received in their inbox and probably don’t need the full power of the client version of Office for most documents in their inbox.
I know that Office Web Apps are Microsoft’s way to combat other online services such as Google Apps but I have wondered how they were going to get the average consumer to use the service as most wont find it tucked away in SkyDrive and this seems to be the obvious answer. Windows Live Mail is the most used email service in the world so if there was ever a way to get online users to notice a new Microsoft service it would be to incorporate that service into the users’ inboxes. If implemented well this could tempt users away from various email and online productivity services and could quickly allow Office to dominate in the cloud as well as on desktop computers.
As always I am looking forward to the next piece of news about Wave 4 and can’t wait for the beta of the suite.
