Musings of a Marketing Maven

A few months ago I wrote that Live Writer, then in beta, was the best prod­uct I’d seen from Microsoft in a long time. It was nim­ble, per­fectly suited to the pur­pose, and well inte­grated with the lead­ing blog­ging tools (includ­ing tools not offered by Microsoft). And the price was great: free!

Well, now things have changed. It’s no longer in beta, but for­tu­nately still free. It comes with more fea­tures (prob­a­bly to upsell the over­all Win­dows Live offer­ing) – none of which has any value for me at this time. The default install includes lots of other Win­dows Live ser­vices (such as instant mes­sag­ing, photo gallery, etc.), which I declined to install.

The core UI and func­tion­al­ity are largely the same – well suited to the needs of a blog­ger who wants to write locally (while offline), pre­view locally, and then upload to the blog when the time is right.

Unfor­tu­nately, it dis­ap­points me when­ever I launch the pro­gram. No longer nim­ble, it has become slug­gish to load. I can’t help but feel it’s been loaded down with corporate-mandated tech­nol­ogy over­head. Even on my fast lap­top it can take up to 10 sec­onds to launch (where it used to be almost instantaneous).

It feels like bloat­ware, I’m sorry to report. Per­haps this is all about brand consistency?

Sorry: bad joke…

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