Users told Chris “blah,blah,blah”!? Nice job, Chris.

I participated in countless beta and CTP programs from Microsoft and never ever have I seen anything close to as unfitting for release as Office Web Apps.

It’s astounding that an Office Program Manager can’t speak intelligently about Windows Live integration scenarios. If you want to test Web Apps in a large volume scenario, how about making doc previewers available inside Hotmail, a sorely needed feature that would get Web Apps some exposure?

Sticking to the party line about users wanting a premium experience on the desktop seems to be the best this guy can do (and if they do, can we please get those updates a bit sooner, instead of in 3 year cycles?) Surely the notion that consumers are creating their documents “in some other tools, only to finish them in Office where they look right”
would light a fire under these guys’ behinds, enough to get them to release a competent tool for preview, but I guess not.

We’ll just wait for Office 2010 to appear “some time in 2010″ and, judging by the quality of Web Apps, who knows how often they’ll get delayed. It must be the countless versions of Micrsoft’s e-mail clients that are holding back the release timeline :).

I love Microsoft as a customer and user, but how guys like this, or Robby Bach for that matter, or other underachievers keep their jobs there I have no idea. They should peek over to the S&T side and see how things are done, how to talk to customers, how to undestand your product and how to win people over.

Huh? Why do we need these “waves” to get more features quickly out the door, and how can an add-on web service possibly delay something totally independent of it? It’s been forever since Wave 3 by internet standards, and very little has happened since. People have been begging for a mobile sync capability in hotmail calendar, better folder management in skydrive, mesh applications that make some sense out of countless existing ways to add files to Microsoft’s online properties, and many others.

Chris isn’t the right person to ask about Windows Live integration!? That’s the problem, isn’t it. The guy works in a totally different division, with a different agenda. I want something simple like previewing .ptt files in WLM and Calendar mobile sync, and for that I need to hope it doesn’t miss a “wave”. Cause if it does, I may not see it for another 2 years.