As Microsoft gets ready to launch Windows 8 operating system, it is planning to do away with Windows Live brand in favour of an all-connected 'Microsoft account.' Chris Jones, vice president of Microsoft's Windows Live group posted on the official Microsoft blog, "Today, Windows Live services are used by over 500 million people every month. Its services run at massive scale, and  Windows Live Essentials applications are among the most popular applications in their categories. While these results are certainly noteworthy, they still did not meet our expectations of a truly connected experience".

Even with such a following Microsoft is dumping Windows Live as "Windows Live services and apps were built on versions of Windows that were simply not designed to be connected to a cloud service for anything other than updates which created some amount of customer confusion."

The software company is aiming to sort out these issues with the launch of Windows 8 which will "provides us with an opportunity to re-imagine our approach to services and software and to design them to be a seamless part of the Windows experience, accessible in Windows desktop apps, Windows Metro style apps, standard web browsers, and on mobile devices."