I tried out MSN Music today. The first thing I noticed was that I was getting a lot of error pages with the "Unknown Error" page being displayed. I know this thing is Beta, but you would think that it would be just a little better being a public beta and all.
The UI experience is much better on iTunes Music Store compared to MSN Music. Two things I like on the iTunes Music Store that MSN Music is missing is Celebrity play lists and the iMix's. I know MSN Music is new and will eventually get better closer to a full release. I love some things Microsoft does and sometimes I just wonder what there were thinking when they release something. I think C# and the .NET Framework are among the greatest innovations I have seen in my programming career. It just seems that the overall quality of software from Apple in there initial releases are at a much better quality level then some of the first version releases I have seen come from Microsoft. Microsoft then picks up steam and by version 2 or 3 of a product, most of the time it is just awesome.
I guess every company has there own methods in the way they develop software. I just wish Microsoft would spend a little more time on some of there projects and get more involved in the community with there development, like they have with Longhorn, .NET, Whidbey, and Yukon. I hope they start going this route with all there future versions of software they release. If they get a lot of feedback from the development community on products, they can up there level of quality from the initial release. Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 will be 2 of the best products I have seen come out of Microsoft in quite some time. It would also be nice to see more involvement with the open source community. I hope Josh Ledgard makes progress with the open source efforts at Microsoft. They have already release two great projects to the open source community, which Josh has been the oversear.
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