The D: All Things Digital Conference may be behind us, but in its wake we have more than just strange "sub-par" laptops to think about - we also have a really nice set of bloggers who are still writing at the D site. Case in point, James Joaquin analyzes Microsoft's utterly insane branding strategy with their Windows Live services.
I've been using a subset of those services - you know, the ones that are built into Windows Mobile 6 - for awhile now and I'm pretty happy with them. Happy enough that I even (briefly) considered ditching my personal gmail account to switch to Hotmail.
Really, though, Microsoft is appending "Live" to pretty much anything they feel like these days. Joaquin is right - Microsoft, you have to stop this. My advice is similar to Joaquin's - "Live" should only apply to consumer web services - that means you can use it for search, hotmail, and probably a few other web 2.0-esque projects.
But Microsoft's current "Live" branding strategy is the antithesis of good consumer branding, delivering a dizzying array of Microsoft brand and sub-brand combinations that are bound to perplex the average PC user.
Read: Microsoft's Dead Naming Strategy
