Via the always-on network I stumbled across a great article by Pip Coburnthat posed the following question: "should Microsoft benefit from the mess it helped create?".

The articlediscusses most of the keyissues, but it should also have included and discussed he following question: "should Microsoft benefit from the mess that we let them create?".By "we" I meanthe extensive pool of Microsoft product consumers, developers, and partners etc.

I have worked with Microsoft products (as a developer and user) for more years than I would like to remember; I have personally experienced the journey from Windows 2.0 to Windows XP (and played around with Longhorn).

I added my question to this dialogas without it's resultant perspective,history will simply repeat itself. If IT technology decision makers don't change their product selection and acquisition habits, then why should Microsoft or any other vendor change their ways? Especiallywhen a perpetual promise-under deliver-repromise cycle works absolutely fine. This isn't rocket science, it basic common sense (but we know that common sense ain't that common).

Microsoft like most software companiesseek significant portions of their revenue growthfrom product upgrades. In a sense, itinherently implies thatthese products will always be millions of miles away from the "silver bullet" promises espoused in the pre product release marketing and PR hype. Sadly, there was a time when Marketing and PR hype used to be about new features; a time when there was a clear line between a new feature and a fundamental product bug.

Buying products from any company simply because they have the largest market shareis dumb! All it does is encourage other vendors to focus on product market share rather than product quality, which ultimately results in the following:

  1. You basically end up paying (rather than at least being credited) for opportunity costs arising from all the time lostnow your PC now works slower than youdo.
  2. You pay for bug fixes and architectural flaws instead of new features

Microsoft isn't a unique source of this problem, but hey! They are the largest Software Company (the one with the vital market share), and their software products areon some 80-90% of desktops on this planet, and the planet isn't at its most productive at the current time, and no matter how you look at it, this loss of productivity has something to do with the increased nuisance of desktop computing.

If Microsoft could just focus on its core competence (BTW - I can't quite pint point this anymoresince they are in every software market that exists today), it would have at least have an iota of a chance in hell of cleaning up this mess.