LiveSide.net

While we noticed a redesigned and renamed PressPass site before, it turns out that’s not all that’s new. Also new is The Microsoft Blog. Yep, that’s right, they started an official company blog to compliment the Microsoft News Center.

Frank Shaw introduces:

For the past decade, PressPass has been the official voice of Microsoft to people who are interested in the company. This week, we’re launching a refreshed and renewed version of the site, with a new name (Microsoft News Center) and more content than ever – full details can be found here. As part of the redesign, we are also establishing an official company blog (this one!).

Almost from the inception of blogging, Microsoft has had a large group of passionate and prolific bloggers at the company. Today, nearly all of our major teams have an official blog which serves as the nexus for the conversations that spring up about products, features, issues and news relevant to that group and the audiences who care about it. Because of this, and because of the way we’ve used PressPass, we’ve never established an “official” blog for the company overall.

As we stepped back and started thinking about how PressPass needed to evolve, it became clear that while we now have a great place to put rich media and information about *what* Microsoft and its partners are doing, we also need a place to have conversations about what we *think* and believe, and to offer perspective on what is happening at Microsoft, or in the world of technology more broadly.

In some ways, this makes the blog the opinion section for the News Center, and the place where we’ll likely first post statements and commentary on breaking news about the company. We’ll also use this blog to point to other sites/blogs at Microsoft when they’re more relevant on issues du jour.

A variety of people at Microsoft will be posting to this blog. Just like many other blogs we’ll be keeping an eye on this one too ;)

Ohh ehh, if you thought you would be able to join in the conversation by posting comments to their posts you are wrong. Initially comments won’t be enabled! They might enable it in the future though. But that doesn’t mean you can’t give feedback: you can mail them from the blog, or directly to the addy given in the Introduction post and About page.

The CES keynote is just about to get underway, but luckily even though CES is late with the keynote Microsoft is early with the press release.  Unless Steve Ballmer pulls a fast one, about the only real news coming from the keynote is a new partnership with HP to deliver MSN and Bing on new HP computers in 42 countries:

In addition, Ballmer announced that Microsoft and HP are teaming up on search and portal experiences. Bing will be the default search engine, and MSN the default homepage on HP PCs in 42 countries.

Still, the numbers for the stuff we already know about are impressive:

• Windows 7 is by far the fastest selling operating system in history. PC sales jumped nearly 50 percent the week Windows 7 launched.
• On Black Friday, retailers sold 63 percent more PCs than they did the year before.
• According to NPD, the 2009 holiday season saw greater than 50 percent year-over-year growth for Windows PC sales.
• There are now over 39 million Xbox 360 consoles around the world, and more than 500 million games have been sold.
• Between Christmas and New Years Day, Xbox LIVE experienced its busiest week ever, adding a new member every second and a record of more than 2.2 million concurrent members online.
• Nearly 10 million people have logged into Xbox LIVE’s nongaming applications — Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Last.fm, Sky, Canal and Zune — using their Xbox as a way to stay connected to friends and family.
• Xbox LIVE membership is now an active community of over 20 million people.

Ballmer and Robbie Bach did will announce MediaRoom 2.0 for connected TVs, and availability of Project Natal this holiday season.

The show is about to start, you can watch it live if you catch this post in time!

The Inside Windows Live Blog keeps on rolling. After a peek behind the scenes at Hotmail, a short history of Hotmail got posted. A very interesting read. For example did you know that Hotmail was born on July 4, 1996 but wasn’t owned by Microsoft back then? It was the creation of a Silicon Valley startup founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith. Microsoft acquired Hotmail late in 1997.

Hotmail was one of the very first services to offer free web-based email and grew fast. It was reaching tens of millions of users in just a few years. Today, Hotmail has provisioned well over a billion inboxes and has several hundred million active users around the world.

It went through lots of changes, remember it started out with a 2 MB storage limit? Today it has ever-growing storage. And that’s not all! The user interface changed a lot too and there were big software changes. Starting in 2004, the Hotmail engineering team completely rewrote the Backend system. In 2005 the Frontend followed suit. All this without taking the service off! Bravo!

You can read the full story here.