Microsofts Desktop Live Strategy

Found a cool new blog with a cool old story but I feel it warrants mentioning if only for the cool community features it brings to the table. Cool! The Live Mail Desktop blog is outlining the features that will be available in the next incarnation of Outlook Express (Windows Vista Mail) and Windows Live Desktop Mail. Windows Vista Mail … brings the Outlook Express core features plus community integration (Microsoft newsgroups), file based databases for mail and contacts, integrated search with Vista, as well as a spam/phishing protection and spell check. Windows Live Desktop Mail … goes a few steps further. It integrates an RSS reader, Blog It! features, Photomail, emoticons, separate POP3 inbox folders. This is great news.. for Jen & Sarah and Gmail. You see, these two will hump anything with a Google logo on it. It's kind of like Microsoft Koolade, the undying loyalty for crappy beta-level applications. While there is slim to no chance that Blog It! will integrate with third party blogging tools this might give a lot of folks that rely on Gmail that offline/archiving functionality that is simply critical. Jen recently had a mental breakdown over Gmail going down ("Gmail is ungodly") and she couldn't get to her homework. Now I'll give you that she is a PR major and doesn't understand the meaning of free or beta or TINSTAFL but it illustrates the biggest problem with "free" services in that there is simply no guarantee, no support and no expectation whatsoever. How do I explain this to my PR folks out there… "If it breaks it cannot be unbrokened." There is no support Indian to call, there is nothing you can threaten to sue because you already gave ownership of all your mail to Google (yes dear, read the agreement you accepted to open the account), and you have no backup because…. well, why would you backup if you have 2GB of storage? Right? Right? Wrong. So how do you use Windows Mail in the most suicidal way with Gmail? Well, open two Gmail accounts. Setup the first account with Gmail as pop3 and then store your nightly backups in the second Gmail account using GMail Drive.