Omar Shahine and team - New Hotmail "Kahuna"

What about pop access? Are there some thoughts on how to enable pop access through many kinds of mail clients not only Outlook? Are there some thoughts on how to enable pop access and be profitable ie. the ads are on the site but not in a desktop client? Are there some thoughts on enabling pop access and not help spammers along at the same time? In any case, pop access would be very useful, however rich the web experience might be or become. With a desktop client you could certainly do much more like the ability to easily backup or transfer all your mail.
Talking about backing-up or transfering your mail from one service to another are there some thoughts on that? Are there some thoughts on creating a standard way of exchanging mail, contacts and calendar info amongst web-based mail services? Like an rss extention or something?
Talking about calendar are you thinking of implementing a rich calendaring experience as well? This is at least a place where there is no competitor yet who has implemented an ajax-based calendaring experience. And in any case, calendaring needs a lot of improvements. It needs to become a mainstream activity. How many users now use the current Hotmail Calendar? How many don't and why not? Do you find calendaring solutions, especially web-based ones, to be optimal? Clearly not and with your experience with the Office Outlook product you could certainly inovate in this space.
Talking about other Microsoft generally, or MSN specifically, products are there some thoughts of better integration between your services? Currently sites are scattered all around the place: start.com, msn.com, MSN developer center on msdn, etc, etc. Inconsistent user interface whilst msn.com has not really improved: still toooo overloaded. You have some really good services but who knows about them: MSN Games, MSN Video, etc? More integration and more awareness through a cleaner and consistent user experience would greatly help.
After all, there is a reason why Google's new services are all conveniently placed under lab.google.com. Were is the MSN equivalent? There is a reason why underneath every beta or new Google service there is a convenient Discuss link for feedback but not only one-way feedback but two-way feedback. Where is the MSN or Microsoft equivalent? How can I report a bug in Microsoft products? A whole mess.
Talking about integration that would be nice but also you should be careful to allow third parties to plug into your services. Where is the inovative api platform: eg. the MSN Activity API is a good step but too complicated to make your activity available to the public (you have to go through the Bestapp contest and still your activity is only available on a little known by users website).
Integration is bad if done to the extreme: allow a link to publish to my blog but only if that blog is on MSN Spaces. Why don't you allow an api by which you could publish to any blog service. Standards like these need to be driven by someone and MSN is in a good position to do that. Instead of thinking only about your own services and their integration, or simply thinking about exposing the MSN properties through an api set (eg. MSN Search), you should think more on how to drive more standards which will unify more the current and future web-based and xml web  services. After all, the platform that succeeds is a platform that gets wide adoption not only by developers and end users but also by competitors through standards or through rich interoperability.
Also, I want to ask the program manager the following programming questions:
If you could achieve so much with ajax (dhtml and javascript) technologies why wasn't it used all these years?
If ajax is so powerful why write desktop apps any more? I mean with the new Hotmail it seems that you can do everything: reproduce Office Outlook on the web, even drag and drop. After all, html programming is more appealing to everyone. Ask university students what they know better: how to write a web site or how to write a Windows application. "Windows application?" they will say, "What is that and how do I write one, how do I get started". Writing html is much easier and there is a lot of matterial on the web on how to get started. Most of the university assignments or program developed for students' thesis that are not scientific but are more in the sphere of user productivity are built on the web: scheduling systems, portals, education systems for distance learning, etc, etc.
Why has Java failed on the desktop or in the web browser (applets) and ajax has succeeded? After all, with Java which is almost available on all computers since the vm mostly comes pre-installed you could do much more, faster, more cleanly  and much more easily than with dhtml and javascript. There must be a reason that html and web-based programming is more appealing amongst new developers and students than say Windows programming or Java. And the reason is surely not availability of the Java VM I guess.