Mil gracias, el mariachi. All good feedback. Thanks. We've done a lot of improvements to the UI and are always evaulating other improvements we can make. While we love switching to Hotmail, we also remain the email service with the most users globally and want to continue to delight our existing users. If people switch to Hotmail, even better. We are doing a lot of marketing to get the word out about Office integration...as well as many new features like Sweep, Hotmail Active Views and Photomail. These 15 second videos are good examples. http://www.windowslive.com/NewHotmail . As for IMAP, I'm interested in understanding why you want it. We have Active Sync now which is great for syncing to smart phones and works with mail, contacts, calendar and tasks. - David

Your #1 UI problem is that you've got hotmail set up as some kind of "portal" service.
That is not what users want. They don't want MSN news. They don't want big ads. They want their email.
The biggest difference I've noticed between Microsoft sites and Google sites is that Microsoft seems to want their users to spend as much time as possible on their pages.
Google by contrast seems to want the opposite. Get the user's search results and then send them on their way.
The fact that a "Home" tab in hotmail even exists is ridiculous. They signed up for email, not a news aggregator. Give the user their email and then send them on their way. Stop trying to add a bunch of new stuff. It doesn't add value. We switched to GMail because it's clean, it's quick to navigate and load, and it doesn't have a bunch of unneccesary crap.