The question I hear most is: what happened to the quality of the products and updates Microsoft (and specifically the Exchange team) releases. Well, the answer is that the focus shifted from on-premises products to cloud services. And I blame nobody expect for the upper management who decided that the company needs to become a Devices and Services company.
And what good does this strategy bring us then? Managed availability is pretty much useless for on-premises deployments without SCOM because of the lack of user interface and reporting capabilities. What does it mean if 30% of the components report Unhealthy on a fresh out-of-the-box Exchange 2013 install? The other example I often hear is EAC which I'm told is what I should prefer over EMC because it's webbased. EAC is there because Microsoft needed it for Exchange Online, no on-premises customer asked to take away the previous interface with more features. Why do we see so many errors and warning in the event logs of our CU2 servers, why are there no real answers in the Forums except for 'me too, I see this too on all my Exchange 2013 servers'?
So yes, I agree that the development strategy continues focusses on Office 365. But please be honest and don't tell us that this brings only benefits. Let me wrap up my rant with another question: Many customers are looking for guidance to configure Server 2012 R2 WAP for the publishing of Exchange. Can we expect a whitepaper similar to the excellent TMG and UAG ones?