I've been using MSN IM and Hotmail for more than ten years now without much complaining.
However, I am more and more getting the impression that Microsoft is loosing the connection to their customer base.
Last year they announced to turn off http/webdav access to Hotmail without offering a viable alternative (and no, I do not count POP3 a viable alternative - where's IMAP?).
Shortly after the announcement they released an update for Entourage 2008 which removed http/webdav without further notice! It was just gone after installing the update and restarting Entourage, which made me abandon Entourage completely...
Now they are dropping support for the majority of the Windows client deployments (shaking head), again, without offering a viable alternative (and no, I do not consider it a viable alternative to use Web-only or stick with an old version).
So, what's next? Requiring Silverlight? Turn off POP3 and force everybody to use the undocumented new http protocol (only available for their full Outlook product)?
I for now have abandoned Hotmail in favor of other free services which offer POP3/IMAP (including SSL), Calendering, Contacts, Bookmarks, file storage and RSS reading without crippling the end user with client-side restrictions (and even opening the used protocols to allow third-parties to tap into those services).
Microsoft is missing one major point here: they lost the mobile device market already and now they are starting to p*** off another huge amount of their customer base by stop loving them.
I would've understood dropping Windows XP support after it has reached it's end of product life cycle, but what they're doing now is just another nail in the coffin.
Sorry for the harsh words, but it is really frustrating to see how Microsoft turns away from their customers. There are billions of computers sold to home users with Windows XP pre-installed. It works perfectly for those people, so why should they reach out and buy an OS update if it costs aprx. 1/4 of a new computer?
Another example: try to open sharepoint2010.microsoft.com with Mozilla Firefox on Ubuntu (even with scripting turned on the UI is corrupted). And this is what Microsoft calls their premium product for collaboration and Web publishing? Yikes!
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