I’ve been using the Microsoft Office 2010 beta for a few weeks now, and I’ve got a few comments about the user interface. But before I tackle that, I want to talk about card games. Stay with me, this is related to user interfaces.

Let’s take a look at two card games. Both these are from Rio Grande Games, and both are excellent in their own way.

Dominion is a card game where the object is to build a large deck of cards, gathering victory point cards along the way. The rules are very simple, and can be boiled down to: play one action, buy one item, discard, then draw five cards. There are nuances, of course, but that’s pretty much the basic rule set. The real rules, of course, are on the cards themselves.

If you look at the Festival (action) card, you can see that it modifies the basic rules by allowing you to play additional actions, buy more stuff, and gives you more money to buy more stuff. What the Festival card does is overload your abilities for a turn.

Now let’s look at another card game: Race for the Galaxy.

Google’s problem is that it has too much money.

To understand my statement, let’s roll the calendar back to the era when Microsoft seemed like an unstoppable juggernaut.

Back in the time decade starting in 1995, the boys in Redmond were rolling in cash, and trying to find ways to spend it. Microsoft was also a very tribal entity, with different product groups competing over very similar ideas. Sometimes it seemed that the team with the best PowerPoint presentations – or so it seemed from the outside – would win funding. Hence, you had products like Microsoft Bob.

Of course, that era also spawned good stuff, like the skunk works project that would eventually become DirectX. Even that effort, though, went through a number of iterations before it was deemed both successful and useful.

God forbid that a tech company should actually pay dividends.

Whenever I think about Games for Windows Live, I feel like Charlie Brown, trying to kick the football that Lucy is holding. Ever optimistic, Charlie runs at the ball, only to have it jerked away at the last second. Games for Windows Live is like that – heavy on of promises, light on delivery. Someone needs to wrestle Windows gaming from the gaming group at Microsoft and give it back to the Windows team.

In other words, give the Games for Windows task to someone at Microsoft who actually cares about the PC. Windows 7 has been an impressive success, and it would be great of the team that’s responsible for making a better Windows for the PC take on the chore of making a better gaming experience for Windows.

Right now PC gaming at Microsoft lives in the Entertainment and Devices division, those edgy folks who brought you the Xbox, Xbox 360, Zune, Windows Mobile and Windows Automotive. While the Xbox 360 is finally profitable, the system has certainly has had its issues – red ring of death, anyone?

The real issue is that Games for Windows Live feels clunky and just gets in the way.