...Because they started implementing Silverlight in all its full glory? 

This is to "encourage" people to adopt MS's solution. (showing what can be done).

...As no one is bothering with it at this time.


Are you sure it's the dev's? Was XBox live recently upgrade to Server 2008?

Wow, so M$-Bloatware carries over from their LoseDoze O/S to their web page - big dang surprise...

Does anyone remember when MS bought Hotmail? Hotmail ran just fine on FreeBSD and handled an amazing load. Then MS bought Hotmail and migrated to their own server software only to fail miserably in the first few weeks.
Windows 2008 is no different...
Maybe they should use Apple servers running Darwin (Ouch!!!)

I've long since given up trying to find anything on the Microsoft site using their inbuilt search function.

Using google and specifying the Microsoft domain is far faster and invariably gives you what you want in the first 3 results, unlike the Microsoft search!

Yah you can tell their webdevs are bad just look at the main MS site. Right side menu on an English page. Thats just bad design.

Microsoft.com loads up in seconds for me, I wouldn't complain about the speed. And, its stupid to suggest that they are using Server 2008 for their web server. Why on earth would any company use an in development product on their production servers, it doesn't make sense.