I'll be honest I've barely looked at the cloud side of Windows Live. I use several Windows Live apps for local stuff, but I never use the related online services. From what little I've seen, the interface and navigation doesn't seem quite as intuitive or elegant as Google's solutions. I know I give you a lot of crap about Google (in good fun of course 
) but gmail is one product that you couldn't pay me to give up.
I LOVE Office Web Apps. I love the look and feel of Office and the Web Apps look like Office. Google Docs are ok but they look dated. I also love the 25GB of storage, which can be used for anything, you get with SkyDrive, as opposed to Google Docs, where you get 1GB for docs. You get the 7GB+ for gmail but you they don't let you use it for document storage. I think SkyDrive is the best cloud deal around. Twenty-five free gigs is tough to beat.
But what I brought this back up was for Open Office (which also looks dated). I was just surfing around and went to openoffice.org and discovered the latest (non-stable) version of OO was 3.3, release candidate 9. RELEASE CANDIDATE NINE!!! There is no such thing as nine release candidates! It's not a release candidate if you have nine of them. It's a beta. Call it a beta! Do they even understand the meaning of "release candidate"?
Piggybacking on this, it's the problem I have with OO, specifically (Firefox too) and open source software, generally. In open source software projects there's frequently a lack of top-down control, which it would seem, if you have NINE release candidates for any software release. Firefox 4 is supposed to have, at least, 11 betas (8 so far) and one or two release candidates. Originally, there were supposed to be 7 betas for FF4. Seven is still too many but 11 is inexcusable. I remember FF4b6 was out for at least two months and it was DREADFUL. I wondered how could you get to the sixth beta release and the program still be this terrible! What were betas 1 through 5 for?
Microsoft's closed source software management is much more ordered and I love order. You get TONS of top-down control at Microsoft.
