...with more bleeding-eye advertising, vendor tie-in, incompatibilities and insecurity than any other online service! Why miss out?

Seriously, though, in any other environment the sane explanation for online services and software is that they are browser and platform independent, easily accessible, etc. Is there any possible customer-centred reason why the MS Live stuff is better than desktop software?

Why does the beta installer have to close iTunes? What are M$ doing to my nice apple products?

Probally like Adobe CS3 wants Messenger closed, Outlook closed, hell it wants anything opened closed

Ehm... Permission to say WTF?!

Sunglasses please...

Only Windows Live Messenger 9 (which is better than 8.5 anytime) has advertising and are locked with a single service.

Windows Live Writer is the best WYSIWYG/code desktop blogging software at its price point, and do not have any vendor tie-in (you can use it with a lot of blogging services like wordpress, typepad, blogger and of course live spaces and can upload videos straight to YouTube and Soapbox without visiting either sites). If you can suggest another alternative that is free and has as many features as Writer, feel free to write about it here. It is safe too, never heard about a remotely-exploitable priviledge escalation exploit bug that can be associated with this software.

Windows Live Mail allows you to use Hotmail without all those ads. Plus Gmail without those ads, Yahoo! Mail! if! you! are! insane! enough! to! pay! or any other POP/IMAP/NNTP accounts. Has calendaring too but Microsoft is smart enough not to allow this to connect to an AD server.

Then there is Live Gallery which is not that good compared to IrfanView of FastStone Image Viewer. But this software allows you to upload to Flickr and Live Spaces so not exactly vendor-locked to Microsoft services.

Live Toolbar is just as useful (or useless) as Google Toolbar/Yahoo Toolbar/Megaupload Toolbar etc. thus even I avoid installing it.

"Keep your life in sync"?! What shite!

How did we ever manage without online applications? Oh, what's that? Most of us do? Well I'll be hornswoggled.

Maybe windows installation software still hasn't nailed the "independent software" thing. I upgraded Java the other day and had to close Exchange and Excel in order to do it.

Tux is smiling because my home system doesn't have these problems...

Possibly cos iToons spreads itself over a windows install like the plague through medival Europe

iToons is like a fecking rash and is usually closely followed by syphalitic member of the French 17th Century aristocracy.

As opposed to windows usual behavour of a slightly thick member of the Windsor family.

It looks pretty ugly. For some reason my display picture at the top has a nice, thick, green border around it on a blue background. Also the text is enormous and my display name at the top has the ugliest yellow glow around it.

Who the heck designed this? It's horrendous!