Microsoft, why must you suck?

So it appears Microsoft decided to roll out live.com tonight to MSN Spaces. Maybe the damage goes further then that, but it's the first thing I've noticed. Live.com, for those who are not familiar is Microsoft's answer to Web 2.0. It's super super Ajaxified(TM) but provides little more power and much worse speed. I'm on a cable modem with a 3 ghz computer, and everything that has anything to do with Live.com has ran slow for me. I thought maybe just because it was under development, but no. Microsoft's new Live maps are a pretty good answer to Google Maps, except that most of the Satellite data is out of date, and it's much slower then Google maps. Live.com the search engine has some neat new tricks, but since it doesn't bring up Used Cars On-Line anywhere near the top of the search results for "used cars", unlike every other search engine, it must suck.

Well, I could pretty much avoid those things in the past. But now they've gone and applied live.com to MSN Spaces. There are not MANY great blogs on MSN spaces, but there are a few I read, the best being The Fat Cyclist. When I launched the blog for BudgetSimple, I decided to try MSN Spaces, it was clean, it was easy, it was fast and it just worked, which is much more then I can say for Blogger. It had a major drawback in that only people with Microsoft Passport accounts could comment, but whatever.

So now they've live.com-ified everything. Let me whip out a screenshot of the beauty of it:



I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe they are still rolling this thing out. But it is slow as hell, and looks terrible in Firefox.

Edit: They evidently still were rolling out. In my day that's not an appropriate rollout window, but maybe they are following the Google model all the way ;). It looks better now, but still a little unecessary.