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Slipstreaming features on Windows Live

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The beauty of services is that it provides the ability to add new features rapidly and discretely.  I was playing around with some of my photos on https://home.live.com earlier and when looking at an album’s thumbnails it gave me an option to install a new feature that made my thumbnails look even better. 

Well of course I want my thumbnails to look better, so I installed the update (see above screen clipping).  The result that instead of all my thumbnails being different sizes they all became the same size and all neatly aligned with each other. 

What was happening whilst the "update” was being applied? Well, behind the scenes all the thumbnails were being batch processed and resized to the same size.

The nice thing about the message was that it

  1. Brought the new feature to my attention
  2. Asked me for permission before installing the update

I like the way the team implemented this new feature and am looking forward to see how they try and “sell” me new features before I actually give them the OK to install them.

If you’ve not checked out the new https://home.live.com I would recommend you check it out.  You can check out my profile here: https://cid-ce01f3609c4bee56.profile.live.com

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    I wrote recently about the Windows Live slipstreaming of features and how it’s nice to get visibility

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Hey Shashi - you are too popular for your own good! :-)  i'll pass on that bit of feedback to the team. Cheers James

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Hi Fowl, yeah that's a really good observation.  I guess a "Explain" link or something that digs into some of the detail would be useful so you know what is going on.  Also, a history list of things that the user has changed to their experience over time with ability to rollback an individual feature. Of course this gets messy when you are talking about multiple features that have dependancies on one another. James

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    It is very hard to convince people to change to online services when they change so much without notice, and no recourse in the case of regressions. It's good to see that at least Microsoft is starting to take consistancy seriously - although "better" is a very subjective term so a unqualified "make it better" button isn't that useful unless you know what it does....

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Thanks for the feedback Joe, could you send me a screenshot of the newsgroup view to james@microsoft.com and I'll pass it on to the team. Cheers James

  • Anonymous
    January 02, 2009
    very good.   very happy with all the Live updates.   Windows Live Mail with newsgroups I am not happy with.. very hard to read. Thanks for the info Keep up the good work

  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2009
    Hi James, I was trying to import my outlook contacts to my windows live acct but there is a limit of  1250 and I have more than 3k contacts. Just FYI. I always knew I should not have so many contacts :) Shashi