Microsoft is a company that tends to breed passionate opinions, albeit mostly misinformed. This is a natural side effect of their extreme propensity for evil and their incredible ability to market products to the ignorant and incompetent. I'm not saying that all their software is the worst ever made -- I'm saying that strategically, they have been very successful at making the quality of their software entirely irrelevant. Their organization and business model has evolved to the point where they can now sell CD's without any software whatsoever on it for nearly any amount of money, and include any functionality and bugs in a later patch.
It's a common statement of the NBM (Nothing-But-Microsoft) crowd, that people who are mortally offended by the low quality of Microsoft software are simply jealous of the company's success, and that any company that rich obviously must have better software. This is a lot like arguing that the woman who sleeps with the President of the United States must obviously be the most beautiful woman in the world. Sure, it's plausible, but you have to close your eyes pretty tight to hold on to that belief.
This isn't to say that Microsoft isn't talented. Not at creating software, of course, but that is clearly beside the point. No other company in history has been able to manipulate their customers into a position of bending over for their products and enjoying it, or heck, sometimes not even realizing that they're bending over at all.
At any rate, let's lay out the genius that is Microsoft, so that we may learn:
Let's say you're interested in selling a Word processor. Naturally, you'd think the way to maximize profit would be to create the best product you can, and market its best features. Not so! Think about it -- there are a lot more morons than geniuses around. Let's say there are two companies, one that makes the ideal word processor, and one that simply telemarkets morons and sells them a crappy word processor, promising that it will mow their lawns and save their marriages, as long as they BUY NOW. In short order, you have a world of morons using a crappy word processor, and these morons are damned well going to be sending their files to people with brains and ideal word processors. Pretty soon, the people who don't fall for the scam have to buy the crappy word processor, too, even though they realize it's a crappy word processor.
This has got to be the greatest line in history, because there are people who actually believe it. Granted, these people aren't going around creating bug-free software, but even making this statement shows a sheer lack of facilities. It's like saying all cars have flaws. Well, sure, but if you can't make a value judgment between a door ding and a car that bursts into flames when you press the horn button, then you really deserve to be taken out of the gene pool in a flaming Gremlin.
I do believe that the person who invented this phrase will receive poetic justice when their doctor informs them that they have a terminal disease, and adds, "well, hey, all people get sick."
Well, now that we've set the expectations that the current software is pretty much going to suck no matter what, the next thing to do is convince the user that the next version will fix the bugs in the current version, and actually shell out money for it. It's best not to fix any but the most heinous bugs without insisting upon an upgrade, and constantly reshuffle the user interface so that you can actually "fix" it in the next version, which means reshuffle it again so that some things get easy, and others get harder. You can pretty much keep this up forever, especially if you make sure that the new versions produce files that the old versions can't read (see above.)
XP Contacts the Mother Ship, and what the Hell did I just
agree to?