Then there's the sheer usability of the site. Firstly, it's not as stable as it should be. Microsoft keeps sending me press releases showing that gobs and gobs of users have jumped onto Office Live, which is great for Redmond but apparently affects reliability for the folks using it. We haven't lost any data -- I'd have been spitting nails over that -- but you get kicked off occasionally, and that Passport login/logout process only works some of the time.

Uploading documents is also a somewhat hit-or-miss proposition -- again, no data loss, but having to upload a doc twice or more can really chap my posterior.

Then there's screen design. So far, Google is spanking Microsoft's rump with a broomstick in that department. Example: A console to something like Office Live should look like a console: dashboards, lists of users currently online, chat window in the bottom right-hand corner, stuff like that. Instead, it looks like a Web page advertising the Office Live service. Finding what you're looking for means digging around in sub-menus. One-click shortcuts right off the top page is not unrealistic for this application and should be up there by default.

And simply the way the apps are organized is unintuitive. To use a shared document repository, for example, doesn't mean clicking on something obvious, like Document Library. It means creating a team "workspace" (a synonym for meeting) and uploading a set of docs specific to that workspace. I get that Microsoft is trying to give us more granular control over who sees what, but it's completely unintuitive for a product that's supposed to be geared for rank beginners. And if you want a look at all your uploaded docs, you'll most likely be clicking through multiple workspaces.