The news of Windows services and Live.com site came as a surprise. Here is a company which makes money by traditional software licensing (remember Microsoft EULA?). On reading further, it became clear that it does not involve putting any of the cash cow businesses of Office, Windows etc through the web.

Now about the services available on Live.com beta site. The new version of MSN messenger seems to be more of a trick to make the overall basket look 'filled with goodies'. The weather service seems interesting, and more tuned to what could be used by web services in future. I would not mind if I had to pay a few cents every time I used it. It could be integrated with my desktop or a persoanlized page, or maybe even as a traybar icon (which I can switch off too!).

Other services like email etc are probably to counter threat of AJAX based services by other players like google.

It is too early but overall, this seems like a marketing signal to the community that MS is not actively thinking about threat to its businesses.