Well, I got an email a couple of days ago inviting me (and I suspect, most of the known world) to download Office 2007.

What an interesting package!

Firstly, Word, Excel and Powerpoint have undergone significant make overs - the result are applications which put the most useful things in the application right in front of you in a friendly tool bar. I very much approve, and it is going to start a (welcome) change to the whole tradition of windows apps look and feel.

However, the make over is incomplete in the beta at least. Outlook has the new style windows when reading an email, but its main window remains unchanged (for the most part). The other members of the family, Publisher and Infopath have not changed at all, and the result is quite disappointing. I was looking forward to changes in Outlook, they have added RSS support, which seems quite nice, certainly more pleasant that the support in Thunderbird, there are also various fresh ups in the look. The fact your coming meetings and todo lists now appear by default on the same screen as your email is a welcome change.

Inspired by Office 2007, I thought I’d have another look at IE 7, and the Windows Live Messanger, and was again disappointed. Beta 2 is just so unstable, I can’t use it for more than a few minutes before it dies. Am I the only person who has this happen??

Secondly, the IE look and feel isn’t a patch on the new Office 2007 look, they’ve taken the same approach of ’simplify’, but they’ve not done it with the same level of success. I actually find IE 7 quite dis-orientating and amateurish, maybe it will undergo a look update before release.

Which brings me to the final point….. Unless these apps are all going to be scrubbed up before they reach final, the coming batch of MS releases are going to an odd bunch of applications - all with quite different looks and feels, did they loose their visual standards? Have camps formed around new UI ideas?

In short, whats going on?