Believe it or not I’m actually finding myself kind of liking the approach Microsoft is taking towards tying their “Live” services together and launching some new online products. Some good ideas are there, but unfortunately the design and execution still simply are not.

Case in point: I go to try out their new Windows Live Translator service today and get a ‘500 Internal Service Error’ when trying to translate everything from a paragraph down to one simple word. It simply does not work.

Maybe I have to be using IE, but I’m on a Mac, I don’t have IE. If Microsoft is serious about becoming a company that releases solid web apps, they’re going to have to leave the IE-only support approach behind (and I’m not even sure that is the case here because their other apps seem to be working okay in Camino and Firefox).

So for now what we have is another Microsoft product that has failed at launch. Yes, I know it’s still in beta, but it does not work AT ALL. Pardon the pun, but Microsoft is Lost in Translation.