HELIOLITH

I haven’t stopped to look back very often since leaving Windows behind a year and a half ago. I’m not one to bash Microsoft at every opportunity. The fresh air of freedom of choice that I’ve experienced since moving into the Free Open Source Software side of tech-life is too good for me to dwell on the negative. Yet the juxtaposition of this new-found freedom with the tactics Microsoft continues to deploy is sometimes mind-blowing.

You cannot lock users in, and be their ally!

There’s a thread on Slashdot today via Beta News talking about how Microsoft has made a deal with 72 colleges for students’ official emails to be a part of their new Live Drive email services. The kicker is that this is email doesn’t support POP or IMAP, not to mention SMTP and you can’t foward it to another address.

Apparently, you can’t access all of Live Mail’s features without Internet Explorer. Perhaps they should re-read “What are Web Standards and Why should I use them?” which is a primer on the World Wide Web Consortium, of which they are members. Oh and they’ll turn the ads back on most likely after you graduate, they said they “reserve the right” to do that.

The move is intended to promote the Windows Live suite of services, and also establish continuing loyalty… 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.

They claim there’s no “ulterior motive,” yet they’re very clear that they want to capture these students as lifelong users. There is a lot of intelligence at Microsoft. Some of the programming code that they’ve written is reportedly brilliant, and they have elite developers doing cool research like inventing a new OS called Singularity.

When it comes to marketing though, they seem more unslick and crass than Phillip Morris…