johncory - 6:24 pm on Mar 14, 2006 (gmt 0)

Ok, I'm going to apologize in advance for this post. Obviously, I'm not tenured enough around here to post a rant but, MS Live?, c'mon.

I'd be interested in MS if they were using their huge capital (it is still huge, right?) to establish free municipal wi-fi across the rural US (or Mexico and Canada or Thailand or Africa . . . ).

But this Live thing to me is just a conglomeration of silly little services better-offered and better-presented by the companies that last "premiered" them.

For instance, Gmail's email+chat, weatherfox on firefox, Mac's Widgets (even sucks on Mac - why redo it?), RSS feeds (the news listings actually look better on the sites that Live pulls from), and Hotmail? Hotmail?

To get to my point, I hope no one is trying to give them credit for the "quick turnaround." It's like if the US gov actually got the levee situation together in New Orleans this summer and said, "Hey, look how fast we did that!" I think we would be surprised but, still, completely underwhelmed.

Last but not least, I'm really frightened that my less cerebral clients are going to start asking me why I can't (or shouldn't) put their Hotmail on their homepages. Thanks a lot, Live.

Just had to put that out there. Sorry.