Reason 1:
Simply the frustration of - for the first time since the private betas of Office 2003 / SharePoint 2003 - needing to wait for the public beta.
- no longer a SharePoint/Office MVP there's no longer access to pre-public beta information or software
- no longer working for a company with a special agreement with Microsoft, there's no longer access via the employer either
So from having the rather stupid situation for Office/SharePoint 2010 of having access via both the above sources to the software (often within days of each other), this time around I have none.
Reason 2:
This year I have the time - at least now while the Finnish winter continues along its merry way (snow overnight last night in South Finland where I live) - to do a good job of testing the software and time to report bugs.
Reason 3:
I have finally (after the cheap machine I bought for the SP 2010 betas [I needed one with at least 4GB memory and the ones I had all had 2GB maximum] gave up the ghost) been able to go out and buy a portable that is both fast enough (fastest current i7 mobile processor) and has enough memory (16GB) to allow me to run several VMs at once. [and that has enough disk storage (750+500GB) to no longer need to store VMs on an external disk]
Reason 4:
(remember the title was why *waiting* is painful)
By the time the piublic beta comes out my situation will have changed dramatically with the coming of the Finnish summer and with that the start first of the golf season and then (also) the start of the sea-kayaking season.
Both these activities take a lot of time (say four-five hours at a time including getting to the course or the sea) and there's only a few months to do them in so unless it rains a lot there's not going to be much time over for more than a cursory look at the public beta.
So, what do you think? Should I just ignore it and first load it once at least the sea-kaying season is over and I'm down to "only" one sporting activity?
[I imagine what I will do is load it but not give it the time it really deserves. Rather that than mutter to myself all through the (following) Finnish winter about "why didn't I do more kayaking last summer *while I could*".]