Advertising model for Windows Live will follow Google

Why are they sitting in front of a picture of a sun lounger?

It has emerged that three tiers of service for Windows Live will be offered :

1. Free with advertising support.
2. A second tier with more features with a low-cost subscription fee.
3. A premium-priced, full-featured service for frequent users.

The pay-per-click advertising system pioneered in the 1990s first by Overture then fine-tuned by Google has created a new means to support innovative services and software on the Web, Microsoft executives said.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s CTO said, “Google has done an amazing job of making that ad engine click on eight cylinders. We have all learned quite a bit from them. They and we have barely scratched the surface.”

Microsoft is trialing its AdCenter software in France and will begin offering it for use by advertisers and partners worldwide over the next year, he said. “We currently have about a 10 percent share of the online market. We fully intend to grow this share.”

Yahoo News reports, “Windows Live will be a free Web-based service in which individual users can sign up for a “live” home page that pulls in constantly updating content from a range of information sources including Web searches, e-mail, syndicated headlines from other sites and photos and audio from across the Web.

“Office Live will give smaller companies access to many of the features in Microsoft’s collection of programs for business tasks, as well as the ability to maintain corporate e-mail accounts and data.”