All this higher education thinking is removing them from the real world. If they spend their time taking leads from PHDs, chances are these are students who have spent their time working on campuses where Macs are supplied for free so they are more familiar with the mac world which isn't about the business world. Their latest products - Vista and Office are all about the mac world but not about the working world.

Ask anyone who has worked on a PC using MS office for years what features they'd like -

BCM - make Business Contact Manager work with Exchange so you can retrieve some contact information through Outlook Web Access or so that it syncs remotely with yor Pocket PC phone.

Outlook - Many clients have more than one profile to better differentiate accounts than putting more than one account in the same profile - but you still can only open one profile at a time

Outlook - do a search through your sent items for an e-mail containing the word "memo" the fields it returns are FROM - if I SENT the e-mail, I know who it is FROM, what I need to know is who it is TO!!! A fault for 10 years of office - still not fixed!

Word - line spacing is still clumsy at best - try formatting a resume with better line control for each bullet point - awkward.

Excel - still has difficulty with removing html links/pictures copied from web pages - I've had to create a macro for this purpose - try copying a few lines from a searched item in pricewatch - now paste it in excel - now try deleting those lines or even the buy now item.

Powerpoint - fine for general slide shows but lacks any of the basic tools better supplied by adobe or coreldraw - more pictures would also be helpful.

Visio - still doesn't provide better pictures for network diagrams - standard HP, Dell, Cisco, etc standard units should be included - e.g. Cisco 26xx or Dell Poweredge 28xx or 29xx...

Visio - I miss the SNMP functions in the older version.

Project - Math fucntionality still weak.

The sad thing is these have been requested in MS's forums for years among many other basic functionality requests but instead of gathering these good ideas, MS said - "how can we make our products more MAC like because that is what people who haven't worked in the real world are used to" "How can we make our business products more like a fancy flash web site or a video game than give them more functionality to do their jobs"

SAD - We need Bill now more than ever - there is no one at the helm!!!