The place where I start to get leery is when Microsoft take a product like Live Messenger, which had finally become a near-perfect product, and bloat it into a

The place where I start to get leery is when Microsoft take a product like Live Messenger, which had finally become a near-perfect product, and bloat it into a dreadful "social media" whizbang media applet interface aeroplane control panel. I later found out (after copious reinstallations and attempts at finding an earlier version at oldversions.com) that there's a tiny icon, of which the chance to find is several orders of magnitude smaller than that of the Higgs boson - that restores the bloated piece of crap to a an actual IM-only client. Of course, Microsoft also made the effort of cramming in more awful toolbars (that can't be removed) and replacing all the emoticons with a new suite of something even worse than what you would expect to find in a ten-year-old version of ICQ. This may sound silly, but all chat clients on- and offline have dreadful emoticons; emoticons are meant to disambiguate and diffuse in favour of the sender and represent their mood and tone. That is their purpose. It really makes interaction with friends and acquaintances much easier and joyous. There's a limit to how you can stand out from other IM clients, and this is perhaps the biggest yard stick. Live Messenger had the best (the only good) set of emoticons, and now Windows have thrown it all away while bloating the client even more. I am fine with them throwing billions at something that may or may not work, but why the hell are they destroying their biggest brand products in this futile attempt to becoming relevant and cool? I shudder at the thought at what Windows 8 will be like. Will they implement Clippy in the terminal to compete with Mac OS?