We’ve received many comments and tweets about how people use SkyDrive everyday to access, create, and share across devices. In this post, Lia Yu , a product marketer on our team, shares a few of our favorite tips.        - Anand Babu, Group Product Marketer, SkyDrive...

A look at trends in photos and videos A lot has changed in the three years since we launched the first Windows Live Photo Gallery . For starters, there are a lot more people taking photos. About 10 billion more photos will be taken in the US in 2010 than in 2007—rising from about 47 billion...

Now that the new generation of Windows Live web services has been released, some of you have asked me why we didn’t make any changes to Spaces. Although we did not make many noticeable changes to the service, I wanted to do a blog post about Spaces within the broader context of Windows Live and show...

As announced today in New York , Windows Phone 7 is coming soon! We’ve been working hard over the last several months to make sure Windows Live can connect you to your stuff and the people you care about across your Windows PC, your phone, and the web. Earlier this year, we released the new Hotmail and...

We’ve kept ourselves busy this summer. A few months ago, we released a re-invented Windows Live Hotmail designed around what people said they wanted—a more efficient service to help them manage clutter with features like Sweep and one-click filters , save time with ActiveViews , share hundreds of large...

As Piero mentioned in his blog post, we had two main goals when building the newest version of Windows Live: making everyday tasks simpler, and connecting Windows 7 to the cloud. In the new Windows Live Mail beta , we did a lot of work to make these goals a reality, and today I’d like to give you a quick...

Beginning today, Hotmail is providing you with the option to enhance the security of your entire Hotmail session with HTTPS data encryption (via secure socket layers, or SSL), which is currently used to help secure your Hotmail sign-in. Today’s update joins a series of other recent security updates ...

ZDNet’s Ed Bott penned a very thorough comparison of Photo Gallery 2011 and iPhoto ‘11 in The Ed Bott Report this past week. While he doesn’t go so far as to declare a winner, he highlights some clear advantages to our design approach. In a lot of ways, his experience and analysis reflects what we set...

We’ve spent the last few months posting about how we look at the industry, the key customer problems that are top-of-mind for us, and where we think we can improve the lives of our customers. Today in a speech at the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, Steve Ballmer is sharing a preview of the new Windows...

When I talk about what we’re doing in Windows Live, people often start by asking me: What is Windows Live ? Many folks know about Hotmail and Messenger , and there are millions of users of our other desktop apps and services like SkyDrive , Photo Gallery , and Movie Maker . So what people are really...

In recent posts we’ve talked about the new Messenger and the re-invention of Hotmail . Today, we’re going to spend time on the new Windows Live Essentials . You can also view this video on YouTube Windows Live Essentials – the essential software for...

This post has been updated to correct an error in the example showing how to upload a text file via HTTP POST. With the announcements on Windows Store we wanted to share new work we were doing to help developers on Windows, Windows Phone and other platforms use SkyDrive in their applications. A few months...

In part one and part two of this series, I talked about the principles that guided our design for the new Hotmail and showed you how we’re helping you navigate your email and manage your inbox more quickly and easily. Today, in this last part, I wanted to show you a few features that we designed to help...

Wanting privacy is not about needing something to hide. It’s about wanting to maintain control. Often, privacy isn't about hiding; it's about creating space to open up. If you remember that privacy is about maintaining a sense of control, you can understand why Privacy is Not Dead. There are good reasons...

In the past, you’ve heard us talking about the many different types of email and how this creates an opportunity for us to transform Hotmail in ways that help you do more right in your inbox. Over 90% of all email contains a link to some deeper content that isn’t being surfaced in the email...

As we look at usage patterns for people who use Windows Live Photos , Messenger , and other online services, we've seen the emergence of a broad pattern that has been shaping our thinking as we work on new versions of our products. What we see is an explosion of sharing – and of its natural consequence...

The first thing that comes to mind when you think of Windows Live Messenger is usually instant messaging – bouncing short text messages back and forth. But there are tons of things we've built into Messenger to make that experience more meaningful, and closer to a real face-to-face interaction. My name...

When we launched Windows Live SkyDrive in August of 2007, we had the clear goal to make sharing easier and better for anybody on the Internet. But offering free storage to the world is a risky proposition – the list of services that have tried to do this and failed is long. So we took it slow, starting...

This past Monday, July 4 th , the Hotmail team celebrated our 15th birthday ! This is a big milestone for us, and we thought it was a good time to look back at the past year and share how some of our recent changes are being used. The first 15 years have been busy, and none more so than this past year;...

Microsoft is committed to offering cloud services that deliver access to your information across devices and platforms. Hotmail provides sync of mail, calendar and contacts across devices, and SkyDrive gives you access to up to 25GB of documents, photos, and videos from anywhere in the world through...

These are exciting times to be working on an email product. This is perhaps surprising, given that email has been with us since the very first days of the Internet. It is one of the most ubiquitous and well understood communication technologies, right up there with the telephone and the (snail mail)...