This morning Steven Sinofsky, President of the Windows and Windows Live Division at Microsoft, revealed in his blog post the first official screenshots from Windows 8 Consumer Preview, which gave us a glimpse of the new Office 15 suite and “Windows Communication” apps (essentially Metro-styled Windows Live apps). Furthermore, contents from the Windows Store is also revealed, showing what will be available in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. Of particular note is the existence of the Zune brand within the store, see image below:

Reports around the internet seems to suggest that the Zune client isn’t dead yet, given the existence of the “Zune Music” and “Zune Video” apps, as shown above. However, we tend to think that these two apps merely provide access to the Zune marketplace, much like their counterpart apps in the new Xbox 360 dashboard. As far as the Zune client is concerned, we think it is dead, and media playback will be handled by the Metro-styled “Music” and “Video” apps – potentially a replacement of Windows Media Player:

If this seems to be the case, it ties in nicely with previous reports about Windows Phone 8 having a separate sync client other than Zune, further suggesting that the Zune client is gone:

Windows Phone 8 will reportedly scrap integration with the desktop Zune client in favor of a syncing relationship with a dedicated companion application.

The Verge even suggests that the Zune branding might not stay for long, and will be removed by the time Windows 8 ships:

We are hearing that [the Zune] branding will be removed shortly before the Windows 8 release, moving to Xbox Live for Windows as the entertainment brand for Windows 8 Music, Video and Games.

What do you think the future holds for Zune? Will it still exist as a branding for music and video services? Or will it be merged into the Xbox LIVE branding? Let us know in the comments below.

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A report from the Wall St. Journal today has Google readying a launch for its version of Dropbox/SkyDrive/iCloud (although they don’t even mention SkyDrive), called Drive.  The new service, which the WSJ says may be launching “in the coming weeks or months”, is expected to have a similar pricing schedule to Dropbox (free up to a size limit, with a paid option for larger storage capacities).

The consumer cloud storage business has been booming lately, with Dropbox recently raising $ 250 million at a $ 4 billion valuation, and the business as a whole growing rapidly, as noted by The WSJ:

World-wide, $ 830 million was spent on such file and back-up storage services in 2011, and that figure is expected to grow by 47% to $ 1.2 billion this year, according to Gartner Inc.

Long time readers of LiveSide will remember that Google has had an interest in a SkyDrive type service for a long time.  We initially reported on GDrive way back in July of 2006, which was also our first mention of the name “Sky Drive” (we’d already reported on news of a similar project from Microsoft, Live Drive).  A blogger by the name of Corsin Camichel even had a screenshot of “GDrive”, code named Platypus:

The Wall Street Journal has reported on the imminent unveiling of GDrive before, the first time in November of 2007 .  Nothing became of that, because Google reportedly shelved the operation to concentrate on Google Chrome, according to MG Siegler, writing for TechCrunch:

It wasn’t until earlier this year that we found out what happened, thanks to Steven Levy’s book In The Plex. In 2008, GDrive was about to launch under Bradley Horowitz (now a lead on Google+), but Sundar Pichai (now the SVP of Chrome) convinced Google’s top executives not to launch it. The reason? He felt like the concept of a “file” was outdated (sounds more than a bit Jobsian) in the cloud-based universe that Google was trying to build. After some debate, the powers that be at Google agreed and GDrive was shelved, and the team moved over to the Chrome team.

But Siegler reported that GDrive was making a comeback (his post was from August 2011, and spurred by a Hacker News report on a new url, drive.google.com)  We’re not sure why we’re supposed to believe them this time, but Google’s launch of a SkyDrive/Dropbox competitor makes a lot of sense.  That competition is apparently welcome, at least to our old friend Harrison Hoffman, a Product Manager on SkyDrive:

The more the merrier! RT @MattRosoff “Google Is Painting A Big Fat Target On Dropbox $ GOOG http://t.co/SuzrgLnk “

about 11 hours ago via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@harrisonhoffman

Harrison Hoffman

In any event, competition is definitely heating up.  Will we see SkyDrive make more moves to remain competitive, and to shed the image that Sebastian Anthony at Extreme Tech calls “poor little No Geek Cred SkyDrive”?

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It had been a while since LG had released another Windows Phone device, with the last one being the LG Jil Sander, commonly said to be an upgrade of the LG Optimus 7. However, Pocketnow today leaked details of an upcoming Windows Phone device from LG – codenamed LG Miracle, together with a render of the phone. Check it out below:

According to Pocketnow, the device is said to have the following specifications and features:

• Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango”
• 4" WVGA NOVA display
• 1 GHz processor
• 8GB storage space
• 5 megapixel main camera, with VGA front-facing camera
• 14.4Mbps HSPA, 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 3.0
• NFC support

Of particular note is the built-in NFC support, making the LG Miracle the first Windows Phone device to support NFC. However, it was rumored that OS-level NFC support is supposed to be coming in Windows Phone 8, codenamed “Apollo”, as such the support for NFC on the LG Miracle might resort to separate apps built by LG or other third parties.

The LG Miracle previously surfaced on the XDA-Developer forums, alleged to have been sold to a Romanian LG tester. The device was previously speculated as the LG Fantasy – which is another rumored Windows Phone device first appeared in a leaked roadmap for LG in 2011, however no news of the device had surfaced since then.

The LG Miracle is said to be announced during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month, with a release date sometime in Spring 2012.

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Much has been made recently both about Google’s somewhat forced entry into social search as it tries to compete with Facebook, and with Bing’s much friendlier relationship with not only Facebook, but Twitter.  Last week, Liz Gannes over at the Wall Street Journal’s tech blog All Things D got ahold of Bing Director Stephan Weitz to quiz him on Bing’s reaction to Google’s new social search ventures.

Gannes quizzed Weitz on the status and the impacts of social search on Bing, and why Bing hasn’t capitalized more on Google’s issues (All Things D does note that there are some new Bing ads coming, so we’ll see if the gloves come off).  Weitz summed up Google’s approach:

But they are learning just like we are. They did what we didn’t want to do, which was make the user experience peppered with this stuff, with +1s everywhere, the Google+ content in the top corner. I think [Google] realized we were ahead and they overextended. But I know a ton of guys there and they’re smart and they’re reacting to what has been said.

But it’s in the last question that Weitz reveals what may be coming soon for Bing:

When are you going to press your social advantage in Bing, seeing as you have both Facebook and Twitter deals and Google doesn’t?

You’re going to see the culmination of a lot of our learnings in the not too distant future. All those lessons will be applied into something that I think is pretty interesting. How we think about social is always evolving, and the next turn of the crank is more differentiated than we’ve seen in the past.

Of course, for those of us who have grown tired of the always-in-beta on again off again approach by Bing to improvements such as HTML5 transitions in the results pages (we’ve had them come, and go, again recently, and we get regular sightings from readers, but as far as we know, HTML5 Bing STILL hasn’t fully shipped), we’ll believe it when we see it, but are you ready for “the next turn of the crank” with Bing and social search?

ps. anyone spot any new Bing ads?

LiveSide.net

Today a special Bing page was spotted (My Digital Life via Twitter) that is designed for users of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The homepage features a HTML video of a betta fish swimming across the screen, the fish is now synonymous with Microsoft beta/preview version of Windows as it was the main feature of the default wallpaper in the Windows 7 beta.

There are 4 hotspots on the video on the special homepage, sadly most of the links in the hotspots don’t yet work. The hotspots are:

• Meet your new browser
  See what’s new and improved with Internet Explorer
• Connect to the Cloud
  Take your apps files and settings wherever you go
• Frequently asked questions
  Get answers to your questions about the Windows 8 Consumer Preview
• Building Windows 8 Blog
  Get an inside look from the Windows engineering team

At the bottom of the page are three sections; these are:

• See what’s new
  Windows 8 Consumer Preview
• Windows Store
  Discover great apps
• Windows Dev Center
  All the tools you need to start coding your own apps

As you will notice the name “Windows 8 Consumer Preview” is mentioned twice on this page and is the most obvious, public and official use of the name so far. The name “Consumer Preview” has been rumoured about for the past month since it was first mentioned at CES and looks set to replace the term “beta” Microsoft have traditionally used.

Microsoft has announced that it will be releasing a new version of Windows 8 towards the end of February. It is looking increasingly likely that this version of Windows 8 will be a Consumer Preview and not a beta version. Don’t expect the release of Windows 8 to be about sending feedback to Microsoft but instead it will be purely about previewing what the consumer experience will be like using the new OS.

Check out the special Bing homepage: http://www.bing.com/?win8start=1

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Pocketnow.com has revealed a number of new details about Windows Phone 8, code named Apollo, after apparently getting their hands on a video featuring Microsoft Senior Vice President Joe Belfiore, and intended for partners at Nokia.

While Pocketnow doesn’t post the video (which would be sure to be taken down quickly if they tried) they do reveal quite a list of features and improvements coming to Windows Phone 8.  Here’s a quick recap:

• Support for multi-core processors
• new screen resolutions (4 total, no more specifics)
• removable microSD card storage (!!)
• NFC radio support, including…
• carrier branded and controlled “Wallet experience”
• a “dedicated companion application” to replace the current Zune application for PC sync.
• Microsoft is expecting 100,000 apps in the Marketplace at time of Windows Phone 8 launch
• native code support for app developers
• support for app-to-app communication
• a revamped Skype client “that hooks directly into the OS”
• a “lens app” for camera applications, allowing camera skinning or overlays with viewfinders
• “DataSmart” – a feature to simplify tracking of data usage.
• A proxy server to feed pages to IE10, using server-side compression, reducing data needs by 30%
• native BitLocker encryption

In addition, the video purportedly confirms a common core between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8:

Windows Phone 8 won’t just share a UI with the next-generation desktop and tablet OS, apparently: it will use many of the same components as Windows 8, allowing developers to “reuse — by far — most of their code” when porting an app from desktop to phone, according to Belfiore. He specifically mentions the kernel, networking stacks, security, and multimedia support as areas of heavy overlap.

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As Microsoft announced a few days ago that Office 15 has entered technical preview stage, interests (and rumors) are starting to pick up about the next version of the Office productivity suite, particularly around how it will fit in with Windows 8’s new Metro-styled apps model. The Verge reported today that the Office 15 suite might not be as “Metro” as we’d imagine it to be. According to The Verge:

Microsoft’s next generation of Office, codenamed Office 15, will receive interface tweaks to make it more touch friendly on Windows 8, including a radial menu system, but won’t be rebuilt as full "Metro style" apps using the new WinRT programming model. That’s the word according to our sources, who say that the core Office applications will be flatter, feature more white space, and use fewer lines in an effort to focus on content, but that the look will literally be window dressing — Office 15 apps will still be traditional Windows apps underneath.

The Verge mentioned that this is mainly due to timing constraints, given that it would require considerable effort to re-write the entire Office suite to use the WinRT development model. However, it was reported that Microsoft might have two apps successfully ported to Metro-style by the time Office 15 ships – OneNote and Lync – both of which already have an iPad version available in the App Store.

An alleged screenshot of an early build of Office 15 was leaked back in April last year, showing how the new Office might look like:

It can be seen above how Microsoft intends to blend Metro into its Office 15 desktop apps, adding elements of a “flatter” interface with “more white space”. The new “radial menu system” as mentioned above might be seen in Office Labs and Microsoft Research’s InkSeine project, which features a similar radial menu-based navigation for Tablet PCs (of course, the one in Office 15 would be optimised for touch and be more polished). You can check out a video of it below:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

One question we’ve been asking is whether or not Office 15 will run on ARM hardware, given that only Metro-styled apps will work across both x86 and ARM-based devices – “legacy” desktop apps for x86 will need to be recompiled in order to function on ARM-based devices. The Verge heard that Microsoft will be developing a version of Office 15 specifically for ARM-based devices:

We’re hearing that the ARM version will also be desktop applications, running in a restricted Windows 8 ARM desktop mode designed for power efficiency.

In fact, during CES 2011 Microsoft showed off a version of Office running on an early build of Windows 8 on ARM hardware, further affirming that ARM-support will be coming for Office 15. With a public beta due “late summer”, we can’t wait to see what else is in store for the next version of Office.

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Microsoft first revealed the Skype for Windows Phone app back in MIX 2011 last year, way before Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype. It had almost been a year without further news about the app, and finally during CES 2012 in January, a Microsoft representative mentioned during a video interview that the Skype for Windows Phone app will be “coming soon”.

Well according to reports from WP7Lab (via WMPU), Microsoft had just begun dogfooding (internal beta testing) the Skype for Windows Phone app. Furthermore, the website received an anonymous tip indicating that Microsoft will soon be sending out invitations for a beta version of the app. Here’s an excerpt from WP7Labs:

Skype for Windows Phone is just around the corner and we’ve teamed up with the Skype folks to help with beta testing. If you are receiving this newsletter directly, look for an invitation in the coming weeks and be on the inside track for what is sure to be one of the hottest new apps on the Marketplace!

It was reported back in January that Tony Bates, President of the Skype Division at Microsoft, confirmed that Skype will exist as a separate downloadable app from the marketplace for now, and full integration into the Windows Phone OS is expected to happen in Windows Phone “Apollo”.

Skype is currently one of the major apps that exist on other mobile platforms but missing from the Windows Phone marketplace. The exact timing of the release is still unknown, but it is good to hear that Microsoft is making progress with the app. Who knows we might actually hear more about Skype on Windows Phone during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month! Stay tuned.

LiveSide.net

Finally, after two years as a beta product, Bing has officially launched in Germany, according to a press release ( Bing German to English translation) issued by Microsoft Germany last Friday, January 27th.

The press release describes the intensive testing that Bing.de has gone through (translated):

“We have invested heavily in Bing, intensively tested, new features introduced and integrated partner content and with a local team a very good infrastructure and relevance for the search engine created to serve the German market on the basis of this core technology on different devices and platforms in the future,” as Dorothee Ritz, General Manager of advertising & online at Microsoft Germany.

What’s interesting about the press release, however, is a sentence near the bottom of the release, boasting some impressive numbers for the search engine (again, translated):

The ever-increasing number of searches confirm the success of the search engine. Almost 10 million Germans already regularly use Bing in the month. This corresponds to 20 percent of the active German Internet users.

These numbers are sharply different from what we’re accustomed to seeing, as Search Engine Land pointed out.  Here is a chart showing German market share for the last 3 months from Statcounter, which shows a far smaller market share:

Even with Yahoo! factored in (and Yahoo! has a much smaller presence in Europe than in the US), we’d be very surprised if Bing.de is hitting “20 percent of the active German Internet users”.  Maybe it’s the translation .

Still, it’s good to see that another Bing country is out of beta.  If you’re in Germany, are you noticing differences in the way Bing works, now that the beta tag is gone?

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In a post today on Marketing Land, Greg Sterling is reporting that Microsoft is replacing conventional display ads in Hotmail with ads for Deals, including Bing Deals and MSN Offers.  The switch, which is being tested in selected cities, won’t be appearing everywhere, at least not yet.  However, Sterling says that Dharmesh Mehta, Director for the Windows and Windows Live Business Group, believes users will prefer the new ads, as they will be “less distracting” and less “creepy” for users.  The post offers a glimpse of the difference between the current display ads and “Deals”:

Below are images of an actual display unit in Hotmail (left) vs. a screen capture of the new deals unit (right):

In our post last week asking “What’s stopping you?” from switching to Hotmail, and in comments on Inside Windows Live, the ads were mentioned frequently as a big distraction.  Even though Mehta said that Microsoft will probably see a decline in the revenue generated from the ads (he estimates that combined, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google make something like $ 1 Billion annually on ads in email), Hotmail is focused on improving the user experience, and that Microsoft can afford not to maximize ad revenue in email (of course, they could probably afford to eliminate ads altogether, if they wanted to, but that’s another thing entirely).

Sterling goes on to describe a bit more about the new deals ads:

The new deals ads will be initially targeted by country, language, age and gender. However Microsoft might allow users to select categories of interest later on.

I asked Mehta about the deal sources Microsoft is using. He said that some were sourced by Microsoft directly and some are aggregated from partners. The business models and the way Microsoft gets paid also probably vary accordingly. The company said it will be testing out different models and approaches.

Microsoft now has several distribution points for deals, including Bing Deals and MSN Offers in addition to the new email deals ads.

Is this an improvement for you?  With SkyDrive, Microsoft eliminated the right sidebar ad altogether, explaining at the time:

We also looked at the current advertising placement on SkyDrive and decided that this didn’t make sense in this experience. We removed ads to create room for a pane of info about your files, so you can do things like open a doc in Word or Excel on the desktop, directly from SkyDrive.

…but even with the switch to Deals, that same real estate will be taken up by advertising, even though it may well be less “creepy”.  Is that enough?

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