Apparently Microsoft has pushed back the beta Test of their upcoming Internet Explorer 7, which was expected to be released today.

So Microsoft doesn’t deliver.

Again.

The XBox 360 apparently has heat issues and is crashing a lot for some users. Also it has been said that Microsoft is losing quite some money with each unit sold - they are aggressively trying to obtain market share.

“Vista” was stripped of all the interesting features, apparently all that is left is a prettier UI with tons of effects (and requring a DirectX 9 capable graphics board). The big feature enhancements like WinFS will not be included and will take at least one more year to be ready for beta…

“Windows Live” and “Office Live” (which are neither Windows nor Office) don’t live up to their names either: They are just web-based add-ons, even supporting Firefox, and offering pretty much the same as Yahoo and other portals do as well as an online version of SharePoint apparently. They are a meagre attempt of Microsoft to be not totally left behind by Google when it comes to web applications. Heck, these could (and probably are!) be from some other company that Microsoft just bought.

The new office version of Microsoft fancies again mostly a new UI, that will be very different and probably confuse users a lot (especially if they have to alternate between office versions); Microsoft also has the reputation of breaking it’s own file format again and again; the new office will use an incompatible file format again. The UI also doesn’t help people to give their documents a more semantic meaning (for efficient processing by automatic tools such as desktop search engines), but will be more visually-oriented than ever (i.e. styles such as “headline” which do add a semantic meaning are degraded as “quick styles”, whereas the bold- and underline buttons are more prominent than ever - good bye, corporate design!)

Microsoft has been promising lots of new stuff recently, but has it showed any? Where is Microsoft Windows for Supercomputers? They are totally under control by Unix and Linux. Linux is gaining on Mobile phones and embedded devices. When was the last time you read about WinCE? Heck, even the WiFi network at Microsoft is now powered by Linux…