For all to hear: I'm totally calling BS.

We all know that Bill and MS are starting to lean towards delivering more services and products online.

I've got a fat pipe. The web, streaming music subscriptions, etc all work fine. Even up here in the sticks where I live...

BUT: I fire up Books Online 2005 - which is still defaulted to initially aquiring content from an 'online' source. It chugs. It hangs. It tells me that grabbing networked content may cause it to be unresponsive - I might want to change my configuration options.  I try - but the app is completely locked up.

Um. And you guys are thinking about taking over the world with online applications/services? This is just COPY people... simple markup/content. Nothing tricksy like an application. And it won't work.

Same with Visual Studio 2005. I'm sure I'm not the only person to have turned off the start page, so I don't have to wait while it loads when I start up VS 2005.  SURE it does it all asynchronously - and the VS 2005 team has done a good job of making it work. But I really don't care to wait around for what's new/spiffy/whatever.

The web is great folks (heck, it pays the bills around here in large measure). But it's NOT the answer to all of the world's problems. I wish this stupid fascination with Web 2.0 and all the idiocy/hype surrounding it would come back to reality. Let's make good/cool/spiffy applications that are user friendly - but let's LAY OFF THE KOOL AID.

(In case you wondered how I actually felt about it... )