After some great years working on our web experiences, I realized over my parental leave that it was time for me to try something completely new; to stretch my brain in ways I haven’t before and be intimidated again by just how little I knew about something.  I’ve been around these parts since the first beta version of MSN Spaces in mid-2004 – and for a year and a half before that I was working on the underlying platform still in use – and have now seen many our efforts “grow up” into amazing Windows Live functionality like the What’s New feed, our new Profile, and our new People experience (one contact list!) 

I can actually remember when I was one of just a few people blogging regularly about our online services.  While that has taken a backseat recently (we have great marketing and a team blog) the passion to continually improve our online story is stronger than ever.  This past year was fantastic.  The team is functioning on such a high level and everyone is really, really proud of the work we did.  Yet as one wave comes to a close and another begins, it’s a natural time to make a move.

Now of course, there really isn’t a better group in the company to work in than Windows Live.  So while my #1 priority was to do something different, inspiring, and challenging, a close #1.1 was to make sure that whatever I did was within Windows Live.  So effective this week I’ve moved over to lead the Windows Live Movie Maker PM team – now a part of Windows Live as of the latest release.

There are so many reasons why I’m excited about this: it’s a v1 product that already has a big following...  there are big hard technical, UI, and set of project management challenges…  no one has really gotten this stuff “right” yet… the team is rock solid, experienced, and driven… and it’s an opportunity to really play a part in the new excitement around Windows PCs and show how good ol’ software can make a difference.

Curious about the new Windows Live Movie Maker?  You can learn about it here.  In the meantime, please send me your thoughts on Movie Maker – you know how to reach me (email is best).  Although if your feedback is about needing to see “time” in the product somehow, we’ve definitely heard this feedback loud and clear :)  (Remember, what’s currently out there is a very early beta!  There’s a lot of work happening in Redmond)

As you may have heard, the new and improved Windows Live is coming your way very, very soon.  We announced it last night at 9pm and so far, the feedback has been great.  This is certainly the most satisfying part of this job: shipping!  Shipping something you’re proud of that is.  Particularly with a release like this one that was very much a “redefinition” in a lot of ways. 

Long gone are the days when I was the only one blogging about our release though ;)  Check out our Windows Live Wire blog for more information on Windows Live.  And check out the video below for more depth:

Also – read the quotes below.  FUN.  Emphasis below is mine.

Hall underscored that Microsoft is trying to simplify the Web experience by bringing together people and content scattered all over the Web and across personal computers, phones and other devices. Having one central place to organize and manage information relieves some of the social networking fatigue people are experiencing, he said. To that end, Microsoft formed partnerships with a number of  companies including LinkedIn, Photobucket and Twitter. – LA Times blog

It could be pretty exciting for Live.com users before the year ends, especially for U.S. users. And this could make or break, Live.com’s relevance to Microsoft’s suite of web products. – Search Engine Journal

This is Big: Overall, these new services represent a major upgrade to the online part of the Windows Live suite. Microsoft is clearly trying to challenge both Yahoo and Google with its new photo application, while the new profiles and groups tie all the Live services together into a very sophisticated social network. – Read/Write Web

Microsoft announced Windows Live Profiles today, which takes some lessons from social networking sites and FriendFeed. The new profile page provides a central hub for all your online activities on Windows Live. More interestingly, your profile can also aggregate updates from other services, such as your Twitter account, your blog feed, reviews from Yelp, or photos you have posted on Flickr. You can also feed any standard RSS stream into your profile…You can choose the amount of personal information you want to display in your profile and Microsoft gives you very granular control over what parts of your profile you want to share with others. You can, for example, choose to share your last name and location only with friends, but make information about your relationship status and hometown public. You can also choose to make some items only available to a small sub-set of your friends. – Read/Write Web 

In addition to rolling out new services, Microsoft has given Windows Live a facelift. The overall interface is now less crowded with blocks of personalized content.  Another nice customization feature is the ability to add a personalized slideshow in the upper right-hand corner of your Windows Live Home page. The slideshow images are pulled from your Windows Live Photo collection.  Microsoft makes some serious strides into the future of cloud computing with this update to Windows Live. I like what I see, but if Microsoft is serious about aggregating online services, it should bring in more of the giant services that already have millions of members. Noticeably missing from Microsoft's long list of partners are AOL, Facebook, Google, and MySpace. – PC World

In many respects, Live Photos clearly competes directly with Yahoo's Flickr, though while it has a lot of Flickr's features, its focus is more on sharing pictures with a small group of friends or family than with the whole Internet. We have been using Live Photos for about two months now, and our overall impression is extremely positive. – Read/Write Web 

On the whole, the overhaul's quite impressive.  The layout encourages people to create (and/or flesh out) user profiles, and then offers the sort of Friend Feed-style updates to which we've become accustomed.  Profiles will also be useful when it comes to tagging and sorting photos, or creating groups… What's more: it's done all this in a timely manner.  The new Windows Live will be available to everyone by early 2009, with U.S. customers seeing it rather sooner.  This should put Microsoft ahead of Yahoo, which is bucket testing a similar sort of upgraded homepage…  Chris Jones, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Windows Live Experience Program Management, tried to sum up the accomplishment in a statement.  He explained, "Our customers have friends across the Web.  They communicate through many unconnected Web services and want access to it all from a single location - without worrying about how it's done.  Now Windows Live takes care of that, with an integrated personal communication service that works across the Web with optimized experiences on the PC and mobile phone." -- WebProNews

If you’ve been following the news about Windows 7 and Office 14 coming from PDC, one thing should be immediately apparent: experience matters these days at Microsoft.  Ever since the release of Windows Vista and Office 2007, I’ve seen a real shift for the better in the way people are approaching UI design within the company.  No longer is it an afterthought – it’s baked into the product development cycle at almost every level, and people are paying particular attention to the way our software makes people feel.  It’s fun to watch (and certainly has something to do with ramped up competition with Apple).

There are a number of great examples of this over the last year or so at the company – and a LOT more to come over the next few months and years.  But I wanted to take a minute and highlight a few of my favorites just in case you haven’t been following all the recent news.  These are very specific examples, but I think the uber-message is that you should expect (and demand) great experiences from Microsoft now and in the future.  Never again should we release something as confusing as older versions of Office or Windows Media Player or as offensively colorful as Windows XP :)

Zune 3 Now Playing – Just a phenomenal visualization for your music.  It uses album art and stock photography of the artist, along with text to give you a real visceral reaction.  It’s one of the nicest looking things in the industry in my opinion, and part of the reason why I *love* the Zune client (the Zune Pass is another reason).  Pictures don’t do this justice, you should check out the video.

New Xbox Experience – I’ll admit that I have yet to play with this, but I’ve watched the demos a dozen times and have heard great things from friends here on the beta.  I think people are going to be wow-ed by this update later this month.  To be honest, I’m already wow-ed that a 3-year old system that should be obsolete by now is getting such a huge update.  It will feel brand-new again.

Office 2007 & Office 14 – I can’t talk about Office 14 in any detail yet (and don’t know much yet either) but Office 2007 has set the usability bar high.  If you haven’t used the new Fluent UI with live previews, the ribbon, SmartArt, and a dozen other improvements large and small, you’re missing out.  I think the Office 2007 user experience will go down in the books as an update just as impactful as toolbars and menus themselves.  You’ll start to see it in appear in Windows 7 and Windows Live (Movie Maker) over time as well.

Windows 7 Superbar – I’ve now been using Windows 7 for about a month and I dig the Superbar (that’s just a nickname, I think).  The functionality itself is great, combining the best elements of the old Windows model (Quickstart, taskbar, system tray) with new usability improvements like jump lists, progress indicators, Aero Peek (which lets you peek in at window contents) and more.  One subtle feature which shows the serious focus on detail is “color hot-track”. 

Long Zheng describes color hot-track here: “When hovering over the icons in the taskbar, the color highlight of the “glass” button is actually different from application to application. How it works is dynamically abstracting the color values of the application icon to find the most dominant RGB value. Besides the obvious eye-candy, this feature delivers some sentimental value by making it easy to identify applications by color.”  Examples:

Images from Long Zheng.

Windows Live Services, Wave 3 – Can’t talk about this one yet, but one of our tenets early on was “beautiful, fast, and polished” - which should tell you about how hot it’s going to be.  There have been previews posted in some places though where you can at least get an early feel for what we’re thinking.  Stay tuned on this one, it won’t be long.

In all, I’m pretty excited to see Microsoft really embracing experiences in such a deep way.