Microsoft Max disappoints

By Vivek Puri | September 9th, 2006 at 06:35 pm ET         

Microsoft has announced that Max will support RSS and ATOM feeds. Earlier Max had inbuilt News module which was powered by MSN Search and Reuters. Max also has Photo organizer where users can create list of photos, arrange them using Microsoft’s 3D Mantle View, and also share those photos. Users can also annotate by drawing on the photographs without altering the originals.

I installed Max and found it quite disappointing. Max RSS reader has the least number of features I have ever come across in a RSS Feed reader. All you can do is Add, Delete, and View a feed. The reader does not tell which feeds have new posts, cannot rearrange feeds, cannot create folders, cannot import OPML of your feeds, cannot create watch lists, don’t have any mobile support, ……………You ask for it and Max does NOT have it. The last release for Max was in March and after 7 months all they could add was a worthless RSS reader. However the only good feature I found with Max reader was a new, but nice way of displaying news in a 2-page layout, as compared to any other feed reader.

The Photo organizer part was present in Microsoft Max before the new release. I don’t really know if any new features are added to it this time. But if you compare Max Photo organizer with Picasa from Google, Microsoft again looses by a big margin. With the addition of Picasa Web Albums, Picasa is one of the best desktop and online photo organizing tools. Coming back to Max, it does not support any upload of photographs to web, ordering of photo prints, image editing, geotagging,………It feels that Max is just an advanced version of Windows image viewer with the addition of list creation, emailing of list, annotation, and 3D Mantle View generation, as the new features.

Just a quick note from Microsoft Max existing users: You will lose any lists you might have created or received in previous versions of Max.

I think this product is bound to go down. Max is not even worth downloading and trying it out.

[via Niall Kennedy]

Links:
Microsoft Max
Picasa

Tags: StartupSquad, microsoft, web2.0, web_2.0, picasa, flickr