JeffGr, now that I’ve had more than 30 seconds to read and research, it looks like you’re right. Windows Live Mail Desktop appears to be replacement / rebrand of Outlook Express / Windows Mail.

This actually looks more like a re-branding/upgrade rather than a migration of a desktop client to a web-based one. If you read the article carefully, it says that Outlook Express and Windows Mail are being replaced by Windows Live Mail Desktop (which has been in beta). This appears to still be a stand-alone POP/IMAP client that can access Windows Live Mail accounts and appears to have a UI that is consistent with the web client.

I don’t see them dropping a desktop client fully in favor of the web client any time soon. While we are getting closer to having “always on” web access everywhere, we still aren’t fully there. Airplanes, in particular, remain a rather conspicuous gap in coverage. With that in mind, there is still unquestionably a need for offline reading/composition of email that isn’t going to fall by the wayside for quite some time.

Windows Mail is by far the worst part of Vista, with some horrendous bugs such as pasted hyperlinks not working. If Windows Live Mail runs locally, stores mail locally, reads newsgroups and imports your Windows Mail data it is hard for it to be worse than the current Windows Mail.