To explain my thought and decision taking processes, it is probably helpful to understand my digital life environment. Here is a list of our family’s digital life gear we own and use on a regular basis. Yes, it is overkill and a tad bit embarrassing to let the world in on the fact that my wife and I are such gear hogs. We admit quite freely to being spoiled rotten.
- 5 Laptops running Windows (1 Media Edition, 2 Vista, 2 XP)
- Gaming, surfing and internet video device hooked up to main TV
- Lightweight surf-while-watching-TV device available in TV room
- Two nice new personal XPS laptops, one each for my wife and I. These are the Vista devices.
- My wife has an itty-bitty Thinkpad provided by her employer.
- 1 Desktop running Windows XP
- 1 Microsoft Home Server
- 2 Xbox 360s (one attached to main TV, one attached to bedroom TV)
- 1 Treo 700w
- 1 Blackberry Pearl
- Several iPods of varying models (fighting rant impulse)
- 1 Zune
- 2 Nintendo DS
- 2 Sony PSP
I ignored the iPod, Zune, Nintendo DS and Sony PSP components as they had zero bearing on this debate. Also, the Blackberry Pearl is my wife’s and provided by her employer, so that also did not come into play.
So back in December I decided it was time to get serious about my central storage and backup situation in the house. I read some great reviews of Windows Home Server (WHS) and especially about the ability to take multiple internal and external drives and have them be treated as a single massive “drive” and with duplication to sweeten the pot. I had a spare desktop laying around and with a couple minor upgrades (under $200) I installed WHS ($179) and have been quite happy with it despite the very serious corruption issues that have still not been fixed. Fortunately, I haven’t been bitten by this as I do my processing to local disk and then rely either on backup or move media files to the server purely for storage and playback, not editing. Anyway, before I digress any further…
Consequently, I decided in December to just jump in without experimentation and give my soul to Microsoft. As you can see above, all my PCs are Windows-based. My Treo runs Windows Mobile. I have a Hotmail and hence a Windows Live account. I just installed WHS. So might as well go whole hog!
The good news is that everything worked on all my devices:
- I could get to my mail via Hotmail on all my PCs
- Hotmail came into my Treo in the Windows Mobile Outlook program just like my Exchange based e-mail did.
- Hotmail has an add-in for Outlook such that Outlook on my desktop was able to also deal with syncing and also provided offline archiving. Yes, I know I stated that dumping Outlook was a requirement, but I do like to offline archive my e-mails annually, so needed a reliable client interface to do that.
- Also, I liked the new Live Mail client on Vista and could see dumping the bloat-ware that Outlook has become.
- Live has a compelling group of services that all worked both in a PC and mobile environment. Blogging, maps, search, IM, etc.
But then the cracks began to show:
- Many times I’d have to sync my Treo repeatedly to sync with the email server. This got to the point I just synced twice a a matter of habit to make sure I got all or any of my email.
- Live Search on my Treo proved to be clumsy in daily use, not to mention grossly inaccurate even around my home turf, so who knows if it was going to seriously mislead me when travelling.
- The latest version of Live Mail would only load on about half my PCs, such that I’d have to load the old version when I got tired of watching the spinning “loading” circle. I couldn’t isolate this to any OS version or ad-blocker as it appeared and disappeared on the same PC in any given day.
- Hotmail / Live Mail doesn’t support folders inside folders, so I couldn’t organize my e-mail storage as I was accustomed to doing in Outlook. If dumping Outlook use on a daily basis hadn’t been such a big goal, this wouldn’t have mattered as much.
So e-mail and maps / location search were the first Microsoft casualties.
Google’s mobile browser interface is fabulous on my Treo and since it isn’t syncing, there’s no issues in getting to my latest and greatest emails. The Google Maps application for Windows Mobile is also just as easy to use on a small form factor device as it is on a PC. Gmail doesn’t do folders at all, let alone folders within folders, but after a couple days playing around with Labels and Filters I am spending less time messing with my e-mail organization than ever before, while retaining full easy-to-find functionality.
Microsoft, the early leader takes a couple solid blows and yields ground. Next post, I’ll cover Calendaring, Blogging and how Google Apps came into play. Check back to see if Microsoft can hold ground or gives up yet more territory.
Originally posted March 5, 2008
