Robert, stop conversing with the market and start shipping something that people can actually use. Neither Apple nor Google converse much with the market and both are doing quite well, from what I see.

That said, since you wanted a conversation, forget about RSS for a minute and get your fundamentals right — that means Mail. Calendaring. (My MSN, thankfully, is in much better shape.) I pay $20 a year for Hotmail and it’s embarassing that it still doesn’t have autocomplete, or that last I checked it won’t allow me to save a message into my Sent Items folder unless I click a checkbox. Every freaking time. You invented Ajax. Great. Use it. Time was when IE4-powered DHTML ran circles around NS4. Why are you ceding the space to Firefox today? And if you’ve got people who can make start.com, why are they kept in a sandbox and not allowed to touch the rest of MSN?

The way I see it, Microsoft has taken a strategic decision that Firefox and LAMP have commoditized the web so it’s time to cut losses, stop spending millions on IE and squeeze profits out of the fraction of users who will pay to have a marginally richer ‘integrated’ experience (with IE7 and XAML). Prove me wrong. Ship something to show me Microsoft still cares about putting great, usable apps on the web.