Here’s an interesting post I have just come across while looking at the Windows Live Expo Team Blog.

A very common (and good) question that we have been asked quite a few times during our stay here in Las Vegas. The plain answer is that we’re not setting an exact date, but we’re waiting a little longer to make sure we’re satisfied with the progress of the internal beta.
 
As some of you may be aware, we opened up the service to Microsofties just before Christmas as part of a trial to gain feedback and test system stability. It was shortly after this that all hell broke lose when one of our employees in Microsoft China was a bit overzealous (read: naughty) and pasted a copy of our internal e-mail into their Spaces blog. Oops! The cat was now out of the bag and we had to address the flood of press inquiries that arrived at our office. This was all a little sooner than we’d hoped as we now had to be reactive to stories rather than pro-active and explaining exactly what the service was.
 
Anyway, one of the primary reasons I didn’t want us to set a date in stone for launching is because I felt that we should have the flexibility to decide when the product was of decent enough quality to launch (which could be earlier or later than any date we’d plucked out of the air). As this is an V1 incubation effort we have had the luxury of setting our dates in such a way, however moving forward we’ll continue to use the scrum methodology to update our service on a month-by-month basis and continue to add in features and updates.
 
The good news is that you can sign up to be notified the moment we open the service up to more people. Head over to http://imagine-msn.com/minisites/expo/default.aspx and just enter you e-mail address, name and ZIP code and you’ll be the first to know that we’re ready for your listings!
 
On another topic, I believe Kurt (our group program manager) has some photos of us at CES, so look out for those to appear shortly. There may even be a few of us in the infamous party bus as we cruised around the Vegas strip whilst listening to deafening tunes and holding on to our drinks as the bus swung around corners!!
 
– Garry

Source: Windows Live Expo Team Blog