Discussion on:

How can Microsoft clean up its bad reputation?

Do you think Microsoft deserves its bad reputation or is the bad image a result of competitors' propaganda? Either way, what could the company do that would change your impression of it in a positive way? What change(s) would make you more likely to buy and/or use their products and services?

It's those of us who have no choice but to buy their products and services who most dislike them...

Its not just the forced purchase ... but the near complete loss of productivity that came about by microsoft changing well known and established functions, keystrokes, and access methods.

Sure everyone could use 2 or 3 ways to access some function or feature in both the OS and Office suites ... but just like CTRL C is copy .. you shouldn't be changing OTHER things for no valid reasons.

Windows 95 through XP ... I right click a blank area of the desk top and do "Properties" ... something I've been doing for what... 15 years? and now no longer does "properties" link to the same tabs and options with 7 and vista as it did previously. Change your screen resolution ... you can't... you have to access a completely different way ...

Office .. that F**king ribbon bar.. its fine that some people like it, find it functional for *them* but to completely destroy your user base .. to remove from the well established business functionality, your key software suite, and change all the key combinations, not give the users a *choice* of menuing system, or to give them transitional menus.. you cut everyone off.

Sure, with office, new users who had NEVER BEFORE SEEN office were able to get some things done ... but those that knew their function keys, knew their ALT+Key menu selections, and didn't have to take their hands off the keyboard were now stuck grabbing the mouse, and cursoring through several menus trying to find what they had previously known how to do..

And that's nothing for the ribbon's complete backwards nature when it came to operating with Laptops that have limited screen realestate ... and before you f**king morons come back with your usual "hide the ribbon bar" doing so means having YET ONE MORE CLICK to make EVEN BEFORE you can figure out where your previous menu item is..

The fact that before Vista ... users had been using an OS that was similar in access methods for better than 10 years, is one of those key mistakes microsoft made in "redesign" ... you don't throw away EVERYTHING you learned before just to start new.. not with an OS, not with a product base that has had 90% market saturation for more than a decade .... you wouldn't suddenly go in and swap the gas pedal for the brake pedal in a car model ... or move the turn signal selector to the opposite side of the steering column.. you don't change key menu functions without good reason, and microsoft NEVER had a good reason..

THAT pissed off just as many if not more people than those required to purchase the product to keep up with the Jones's.

Having started in computing before CP/M and DOS the last 30 years have been exciting and forever changing. Change is inevitable and what comes out of change is mostly improvement. I would not like to be driving a Model-T on today's highways any more than I would like to be still using PC-DOS 2.01 first released on the IBM XT in 1981. Office 2010 is brilliant compared with Office 97 as was Vista compared with Windows 3.11, W7 is better than Vista.
By the way Ford did change the pedals after the Model-T.

and that is good. That a change is good becasue it's a change, iffy propostion at best, a guy who's been around the block as many times as I have should know that.
MS have two sorts of upgrade
They change the wrapper, so people will think the turd inside has changed.
e.g. 98 to ME
Or they go for a complete game changer, but present it as a simple step forward like VB6 to VB.Net.
They are getting better I'll admit, I peresonaly don't think it's through realising they were c*nts for along time.

One of the most effective advertisements I ever saw for a software-development group went something like "We are committed to continuous, reliable improvement rather than constant change." Would that Microsoft took such a view.

Ford adopted a standard being adopted by every other auto maker. Gas pedal, brake, clutch...steering wheel. Dashboards varied, and still do today. But If they changed to a lawn-mower-type Go/Stop/Clutch system every year, there would be more than a few complaints...and wrecks. MS wants to make changes for the sake of change, without regard for users' convenience. People say "change is good". No. IMPROVEMENT is good. Just "change" could be decay, paradigm shift, fade, Obama, anything. Change is rampant. Improvement is rare.

You definately touched on this multiple times. I think that M$ has tried to put it's fingers in too many pies. Instead of trying to make everything I think they should fund new companies to take on new products. For example, let's take the Zune. The Zune could be made by a completely different company with different management. You could actually have customer support (Something that M$ has never done). The money could come from M$ but then they need to walk away.

I am talking about spin-offs. M$ should stick to Windows and focus 100% on it. Spin off every other division in to different companies and let them sink or swim. This will allow for the diversity required to maintain and support a larger number of products. It would also take the M$ name off of other ventures with all the benefits that could bring.

I have been developing in Windows environment for years and just recently moved into Linux & Unix development.

All I can say, Windows will get slow as more and more apps you install in the machine. Thanks to the registry for that.

However, the same thing will not occur in Linux & Unix environment. I can sleep better at nights knowing that my Linux machine hardly crashes and more consistent than the Windows.

Yes developing in Linux sucks as the tools you have is nowhere as close as Visual Studios but again, the stability is the key here. Plus, with introduction of Android, developers are flocking into Java development ,which again, can be developed in Linux.

If Windows is to appeal me again (I am talking about my personal experience here) they need to review how their OS works and make it more stable, more secure, more consistent and better performance.

Right away some Linux zealot admiring Linux in a blog that barely mentions Linux. We don't care. Oh "more secure"? Ever look at the SANS newsletter? Windows 7 is stable. Unsure how you define "consistent".

I was stating purely based on my experience. You want inconsistency in Windows 7?

Sure, me and my colleagues stuck at "Windows is updating..bla bla" for 24 hours without any real progress due to updating our Windows 7 via wireless. Now I am no packet guru but we expect that the update went corrupted due to unstable wireless connection.

Not to mention most of the updates require restart. Do you have experience using Linux as development environment? Only major update or update that involves kernel patching require restart. The rest is just simple, work out of the box.

Linux is no God, it shares its own weaknesses but again, as a development environment it performs well. Of course you have to be picky in selecting your hardware for Linux/Unix but the point is, if and only if Windows can achieve the same robustness as Linux, then I would come back for it.

"Now I am no packet guru but we expect that the update went corrupted due to unstable wireless connection." - Sound like either a driver issue or hardware. You can't blame Microsoft. They don't make drivers - just include them in the OS - and they surely can't be blamed on a wireless connection. That said, I would never trust a wireless connection to do any mahjor install.
As for Linux [and for that matter Unix], yes I used them off and on for the last 15 years or so. Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, ... Yes, you rarely have to reboot. Things have improved a lot when it comes to updating but I remember even to install something as simple as Adobe Flash was a pain.

"Of course you have to be picky in selecting your hardware for Linux/Unix but the point is, if and only if Windows can achieve the same robustness as Linux, then I would come back for it."

If only Linux would could work with the same range of hardware it might be real contender and I might use it.

As the article stated I think you're reflecting the way it used to be. I do internet marketing - under Windows 7 I have never had a BSOD, Vista was a disaster, XP grew into a good product.
I did Unix for many years, love it but sorry even Ubuntu often needs trips to the root it's not for most folk.
I think this article summed Msoft up really well, there's been a ton of disasters but if you look at W7 it's a good solid product, yes it took too long to get this way.
As to updates requiring restarts, very few and far between, so I'm not sure why your environment, as you report it, needs this mine does not

Unfortunately, Win 7 is just as capable of BSOD's as earlier versions of Windoze. And it still gives you little or no viable information on what failed. Yes, it is not as unstable, but by now MS should have found a way to trap failures, stop something, restart and give proper error messages rather then crashing.

There is nothing like finding your pc bsod'd and that the dumps have no useful information on what caused it. Except this happening frequently.

Stopping BSODs in windows would be a huge effort. At the BSOD point, it's so far past the original error it had no idea what went wrong and how far in to it's various sub-systems the error has proliferated, that it can't come up with any restart strategy except reboot.
The dumps may have useful information, but you'd need the code and a lot of patience to find out. When you get there it will tell you that some deep level function wasn't expecting 0 as in an input or siome such, how it got there, educated guess time. Classic problem of a language with no exceptions (or one with and incompetent design (swallowing). Lot of old code still in Win 7, not as much as there was in Vista, so they are getting better, but still a significant percentage, and it stands to reason the deeper and ore common the less likely it is they risked changing it. Real technical debt.
Happens "everywhere", MS's are just more noticeable due to popularity.
Don't expect it to go away anytime soon, as there is evidence for exception swallowing in much more recent code.

Of all the Windows 7 BSODs they all contained enough information to figure out what failed. It was always a driver/hardware issue.

The purple variety is especially famous. I've been in this industry for over thirty years and I've never seen the degree of calcified dogma that's posing as fact these days.

Granted, Win7 IS the best Windows version since NT 3.51. It would be nice if we could compare it favorably against, you know, its current competition?

Linux and Unix is VERY much alive and well. When you really look around, you'll find Linux and Unix are at the heart of significant volumes of enterprises today.

Think about this... could Google ever possibly be successful had they wasted ANY time with Windoze as their server environment? Please!!!

2011: Year of the GNU/Linux Desktop!

TR needs to develop a filter to screen out Win-Vs.-Linux crap. And the Mac argument is now started. No, please, no-o-o!

Your rants and defensiveness show you to be the only zealot. You should leave that bit of commentary out of your diatribe next time.

But nothing running inside it is. Have ya noticed?

Hmmm...let's see...my multi-booting DOS/Win3X/Win95 hasn't crashed
in some 12 years now. My Slackware box? No crash there either.
My WinXP box...well, not since I quit letting my kids play games that
were known to cause problems with nVidia video cards, not a crash in
2 years...so, must be the Win7 NB!! Well, shucks...not a single solitary
crash on it either.
Guess I can continue to sleep well at night!

ps...if your computer is crashing, it probably is NOT the operating system
itself, rather it is probably some software installed by the IATKB.

...regardless if you run Windows or Linux relates to driver issues. Usually the video driver.

I guess you haven't been developing in linux recently. I have been "playing around" in linux since Red Hat 2. The latest Kernel won't run on my 2 year laptop, and I have tried different distros. Gnome three doesn't work at all, and after almost ten years of 64bit processors, they still can't get the 64bit OS working right. My realtek wireless has never worked, and the drivers are still in "staging" after almost two years. AND I haven't heard a lot of good things about kernel3.

Compare Ubuntu 11.04 with 10.10. 11.04 is like a dog on old hardware, can't run unity without a modern GPU, takes longer than W7 to boot. Is it the way of the world or are Linux developers finding the same as Windows developers did 10 years ago. Bloat moves faster than new hardware.

Ubuntu might be linux if you squint real hard, Linux is not Ubuntu though, all their protestations to the contrary mind.

That's like comparing a full crapware out of teh box vendor install, with the carefully tuned one professionals can come up with.

Granted that Vista wasn't the greatest but it [on its own] got a bad reputation because of the initial lack of software, old software would work on it, 64-bit support, etc. But Vista with SP2 is probably almost rock solid as you can get.
As far as Microsoft missing the tablet boat, well, they - after all - make just the OS. They didn't get into the computer hardware business except for mice, keyboards and webcams [and briefly with networking]. Tablets existed before iPad, it's the manufacturers who goofed badly.
But compared to other software vendors [Google, Apple, Oracle, ...] I think Microsoft is doing a way better job in securing their products.
Yes. Microsoft missed the boat [or got in too late] on the smartphone business and probably should of dumped it. At least it's not as bad a companies that joinerd [for example] the tablet business such as RIM, Viewsonic and others but never anything remotely ressembling a table or a PC before [rumor has it RIM will dump the Playbook, BTW.]
If you want to look at a bad reputation look at Google with the buggy Chrome browser [how many releases since it came out?], security problems with Android [makes me ALMOST want to by an iPhone for my next smartphone] and how many free web apps that died over the year [two social networks with a possible third with Google+], a competitor to YouTube, ...
Oh those who use the "word" M$ are showing their true colors. Anti-Microsoft.

Gis, I have to confess, I am unabashedly anti Microsoft, for reasons mentioned in a post below, however, I understand as well as anyone the contribution to personal computing that they have made. What is galling to those of us finding ourselves balanced on the edge of that razor blade, is that it is so readily apparent that it could all be done better for the user.

Step one, spin off the peripheral biz. While quite a success, this move will free up a lot of energy and revenue.

Step two, Focus on a consistent and open OS core between all versions and distributions. Change feature sets by plug ins and the GUI for variances between versions. Charge based upon features which you can add on the fly.

Step three, simplify the product offering and licensing system. I don't mind paying for thing, but it must be a better fit for my uses than a free solution, and I want the purchase experience to make me feel like I solved the problem, not raise more questions.

Step four, when the structure is simplified, it will also simplify updates. make it possible to do most OS updates without a reboot, simply restart the service. We made that leap in networking about 11 years ago, why not the rest?

Step five, quit trying to buy everything in order to grab the market for which you are not suited. Focus on the OS and the Apps.

Step six, quit treating your customers like felons. While we may be innocent until proven guilty by law, MS Licensing's default assumes guilt. The teeth of this were removed in a recent service pack, but it's rather tough to have to explain to a client that the software I installed on their system 4 years ago isn't stolen... it's a hiccup in the validation system.

Step seven, schools are in some real trouble. Help them out. Get the good PR.

Step seven, offer amnesty to IT pros who have bad software and get MS Certs. Give them a license for the software they certified on.

Step eight, tell record companies and other lawyer driven organizations what they can do with DRM. It is another example of presumed guilt. Defend the client.

Step nine, make a affordable IDE for Windows and Office app development. Offer bounties on persistent bugs an publish the coder or team who fixes things for everyone.

Step ten, lose "monkeyboy". He is one of the worst strikes against the company. Either that or get him diagnosed with Tourette's Syndrome and spastic paralysis.

My personal favorite is Step Ten!!! LOVE it!!!

I must recommend the step 2, step 3 and step 4 Well Said.

Richard, this page is not exclusively for technical "repertoire". It is for anyone who uses a computer and who has taken time to read the article. As to the poster's remark about Tourette's I think the point is that no one would hire someone to be the CEO of Microsoft who was a Tourette's sufferer. Hyperbole, perhaps. Out of taste.. I really don't think so, but then, it is a matter of taste, which doesn't seem to be on topic at all. Go read Ann Landers or Miss Manners.

This is a site for IT professionals. Not the average PC user. That's the level of discussion we want.

Do IT Pros care so little re the USERS that they honestly WANT *NO* INPUT from them?
How 'bout it, C-NET, how does that jive with your intent? Are users to be excommunicated? Are you thinking of dumping the vernacular and returning to old Latin?

Whether he has Tourette's, or any other disability which does not impair his ability to work, is not our concern. Results of his work are the concern of the stockholders, and his evaluation is up to the board of directors. It's more than a matter of taste, it's a matter of fairness.

While I agree that the remarks made about Steve Balmer were in fairly poor taste, it is the only real way to explain his conduct in 3 short sentences without visual aids.

Tourette's and Spastic Paralysis are both serious conditions and require the understanding and help of friends and family as well as the ability to deal with bad moments in private out of the public eye. I have had friends with both conditions. My point was that:

1. There's something wrong with Mr. Balmer that should be medically diagnosed, but no one in his immediate circle of acquaintances will speak up for fear of being kicked out of the club.

2. His conduct is undignified and disgraceful to himself and the company. Retention of Mr. Balmer as CEO is an unkindness to the company and its shareholders as well as to Mr. Balmer himself. He is in a position for which he is psychologically unsuited.

3. His judgment in approving projects and stamping things production ready seems to be less based on data, but rather based upon the opinions of those who are involved in the projects. This indicates that he is swayed by his perception of public opinion, not by facts and figures.

4. Those who allow him to act in this manner without letting him know that he is presenting a negative image are like the friends of a Tourette's sufferer who encourage them to pursue a career in politics. Yes, by allowing and encouraging a dream you make them happy in the short run, but you set them up for spectacular, life crushing failure over the course of the rest of their lives.

5. The CEO of a tech company must be able to wear many hats, from PR to sales, to tech to QA. Mr. Balmer has demonstrated at various points that he in fact can do so, but not concurrently. Further his ability to switch between these modes of thinking is slow and he gets locked in a mode, a phrase, or a thought. In many ways he reminds me of the worst parts of Howard Hughes, but with neither the talent or the ability to listen to the talent he pays top dollar for.

While just a lowly non-"IT professional", who does enjoy the information and discussions, I seem to agree with Alpha_Dog.

While I can agree with everything here the problem is more than all this. As a small builder and service provider we have seen far more problems than solutions.
First their pricing system sucks. They cater to the giants of this industry and ignore the rest. They, along with manufactures make new computers obsolete as they roll off the line.
Most blue screens are the conflict between their OS and the drivers. In one particular case they actually gave a free upgrade to a client with windows home to XP as the raid drivers would drop after a week or two in the home version.
The price for these type of repairs must be reasonable or the customer will buy new. Hard to show a profit at times.
Another issue is the updates. Often times an update will solve problems, but no indication from them. Takes a lot of searching and that's time.
Their methods of control leave much to be desired as well. A simple task of registration can be a hour of your time, and if a customer is clueless about the legal issues it just adds to that process. I'm for a one priced, use anywhere OS.
Finally, a problem that was posted earlier about OS. Programs designed to run on one version will not run on newer versions. Now you must go to a dual boot system or live with an older version that adds additional problems.
Yes there is more but that adds a chunk that you IT Pros may overlook.

I too do my share of support, and while the issues with Windows makes me money, We use Linux in house (desktop to servers) and I recommend Linux to clients for mission critical stuff for exactly the reasons you specify. Before I switch someone to Linux, I sign them up for a service contract. On their side, it covers a little training for the learning curve. On my side, it guarantees that I will still see income from these clients.

Step ten - LOL and AMEN!

But no 9 is not true. The Visual Studio Express line of IDE's is both extremely good and free. The few features they are missing, you don't need unless you're running an enterprise development shop.

That aside, I really agree with No. 7 - the more software you give away to schools means the more people that will pick your software when they're professionals because it's what they learned on and are familiar with.

Good set of recommendations.

I would have included, Stop trying to subvert customer choice by misrepresenting other solutions and relying on FUD. (e.g., the presentations to Best Buy etc. on "How to respond if someone wants Linux", or the patent-based efforts to suppress innovation).

there are 2 step sevens!

And I must say that TG2 really nails it for me with their "wasn't just forced purchase - but complete loss of productivity" post.

.

1 - not likely as it is a success and doesn't use much of MS resources
2 - already doing this and has stated they will do this for tablets/slates/desktops
3 - they actually did simplify the offerings, though they could simplify more
4 - most updates do not require a restart and even fewer will in the future
5 - they didn't buy Yahoo, so they don't buy everything. Good advice for all tech companies.
6 - I have not run into any problems with licensing
7 - Schools do get a serious break on pricing
7 - So, if I certified for SharePoint, I could get a copy of SharePoint free, that'd be nice, but I don't know that it makes sense for Microsoft to do so.
8 - It'd be great to get rid of DRM, but until music/movie/book companies figure out the new digital era, we're stuck with it.
9 - This is already covered for sure in Visual Studio Express. If you need more, you can probably afford to buy the standard version.
10 - Sorry, but this isn't an appropiate statement. I doubt he is even in the top 100 problems at Microsoft.

"Step six, quit treating your customers like felons. While we may be innocent until proven guilty by law, MS Licensing's default assumes guilt. The teeth of this were removed in a recent service pack, but it's rather tough to have to explain to a client that the software I installed on their system 4 years ago isn't stolen... it's a hiccup in the validation system".

The whole post is worth repeating, it seems cover almost everything!

Vista had a problem because Microsoft changed the driver model because of all the heat it took over security issues. Then of course Vista was launched and most companies hadn't written decent drivers.

Windows 7 uses the same driver model and so benefited from the existence of mature and better drivers, and a large number of them.

The main problem with Vista is that it was pushed out too early before the infrastructure was there.

By contrast, Apple has complete control over the hardware and software infrastructure, and is wise enough to launch when ready.

On the tablet scene, there was an EC R&D project called Newspad that delivered a prototype tablet around 1995. At the time, there was no web browser (Mosaic was in its infancy), the over the air data rate was limited to 9.6kbit/s (first generation GSM data), screens were 640 x 480 and power hungry, and the cost was about $5,000 (a laptop was around $3,000 at the time) and it was a bit on the heavy. It took 15 years before the technology developments brought us down to the size, battery life, ease of use etc and a consumer price point.

Apart from a few zealots, does anyone really care what operating system a machine is running these days? Probably not - it is functionality, ease of use, cost and applications.

I have a little thing in my pocket that can do much of what I want on the move - the Nokia E7, which runs a 16 bit OS dinosaur - Symbian. But actually, for what I want, it has some of the best software around.

Rescuing reputation is hard and takes a long time. Back in the 1960s, Vauxhall cars (UK end of GM) were known as rust buckets. In the 1970s, they were the first to galvanise components and offer a 6 year anti-corrosion warranty, but it was the late 1980s - before they finally shook off their image - some 10-15 years, which would (for cars) be 2 or 3 purchase cycles.

Could be that is where people are with Windows; XP was the first really sound GUI OS from Microsoft; Vista had issues, but mostly only in its early days; Windows 7 has been better than anything before, but cautious people still don't know if this a cycle or a trend. If Windows 8 is sound from the outset, this will confirm the reputation to be good and show that whatever the causes and issues with Vista, Vista was a blip.

An Opel

Some Vauxhall are based on Holden designs. GM owns all three, so such things are not really surprising... Just like you could get Buicks that were very similar to Oldsmobiles or even now Cadillac SUVs that are only cosmetically different than their GMC equivalents.

...it's either a great product in a new wrapper, or lipstick on a pig. It's all in the technical details as it is with software.

To improve its image, Microsoft must give out a good product in an attractive package, not put lipstick on a pig.

Everything I have seen published so far, indicates that Windows 8 will not be downward compatible with Windows 7. Not only that, Windows 7 was announced as available and then the noise started popping up about Windows 8. Now I would want to wait a bit to find out more about Windows 8 before jumping on Windows 7. As soon as I start hearing "downward incompatibility", I make a decision to either wait for Windows 8 or just go to Linux, Apple or stay on XP forever. Personally, the only time I would move on is when my PCs totally crap out and I can buy new cheaper than fixing. Unless I'm developing new apps that require that latest H/W gadgets, there is no need to upgrade. BTW, I have an old Acer that cam with Windows XP Pro and installed Ubuntu into a Windows directory (a Wubi install that uses virtual disks) and actually get better performance with Firefox under Linux than I do running Firefox under XP. I have found this to be true for other similar apps. Another plus is I do not have to run Registry cleaners and defraggers, disk defraggers, malware checkers etc on a regular basis.

the stuff you compile for ARM won't run on the intel/AMD machines and vice versa. So there will not be backward compatibility (or any compatibility for that matter) for running non WinRT applications on ARM. There will be ARM versions of Office - details on that we will find out tomorrow.

Like the vast majority of MS users my needs are simple and were met a long time ago. Instead of Office I used Lotus since the early 1990s. Initial it was due to cost but I had to get Office for some work and it reinforced my desire to remain with Lotus.
My dislike of Microsoft is based on two main problems. Forced upgrades at vast cost and the way Office makes it difficult to do work which is simple in Lotus. Lotus does not have all the bells and whistles that Office has and is structured so that it does what you ask it to do while I find Office wants you to do things the Microsoft way. For those who like or are trained in the Microsoft way this may be a good thing but for others it can be a problem.
With increasing bloat I now need a fast processor and loads of RAM to achieve at the same speed the work I did on a Pentium II PC with a 2.5GB hard disk.

Fire Steve Ballmer, and replace his cronies on the Board. Get top management that can demonstrate that it actually cares not just about its own wealth and power, but about the paying customers, the ordinary workers (who've been eating s..t sandwiches for years now) and the shareholders (just look at MSFT v. any benchmark you care to use over the last 10 years). Have the company very publicly, firmly close the book on the Ballmer era and then publicly swear never to do anything like it ever again, and I bet that within six months you'd see a new Microsoft. People would be at least giving them a fair shake; the share price would recover nicely; morale in the trenches would be miles above its deeply subterranean present state; and Mini-Microsoft ("Let's slim down Microsoft into a lean, mean, efficient customer pleasing profit making machine!") could finally take his well-deserved retirement from agitprop and focus on his day job. Win-win for everybody. Especially those of us who care about Microsoft.

http://theintelhub.com/2011/07/20/gates-foundation-partner-in-malawi-vaccinates-131-children-at-gunpoint/

Providing human guinea pigs to Big Pharma at gunpoint... and he's not even doing it for the money :/

Yes, vaccination can cause death. Unfortunately, lack of vaccination causes more deaths by rather large ratios. For measles, the death rate drops by 80% when an effective vaccination program is in place. For those who receive the recommended two doses of measles vaccine, the death rate drops even further since about 15 to 20% of children do not develop immunity after the initial dose.

There are risks and some children do die from side effects of the vaccine. Without vaccination, the death rate from measles in Africa runs about 1 in 10. One statistic I saw (for Canada which may skew the statistic due to generally much better health care, nutrition, sanitation, etc. compared to Africa) gave the rate for complications from the MMR vaccine at 1 in 1000 with a death rate in the 1 in 100,000 range.

As for the connection between MMR vaccination and autism? Perhaps you should check the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy ) part of which is quoted below:

"Claims of a connection between the vaccine and autism were raised in a 1998 paper in The Lancet, a respected British medical journal.[1] Investigation by Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer discovered that the lead author of the article, Andrew Wakefield, had multiple undeclared conflicts of interest,[2][3] had manipulated evidence,[4] and had broken other ethical codes. The Lancet paper was retracted, and Wakefield was found guilty by the General Medical Council of serious professional misconduct in May 2010 and was struck off the Medical Register, meaning he could no longer practice as a doctor in the UK. [5] The research was declared fraudulent in 2011 by the BMJ.[6]"

To quote Charles Spurgeon, "A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on."

I'd check the sources closely too, as Wiki is NOT the goto source for solid reference materials... too easy to get bias and skewed facts, if not downright inaccuracies into a Wiki article... I'm not saying all are corrupt, but if what it says is true, the references should be solid enough on their own to draw the same conclusions.

While Wikipedia may not be a reliable scholarly source, these articles may be used as a springboard for deeper research using the article's references. Item (6) is an article from the British Medical Journal which cites Lancet. This is credible enough for me.

dozens of independent media reports corroborate this story. The Wikipedia report showed up some time later, indicating that there was time taken to research and verify by the authors. Granted, brand new entries in Wikipedia may be inaccurate, but the process of peer review works surprisingly well.

... it's still not good enough reason to drive children to vaccination at gunpoint.

MHO about vaccination has nothing to do with internet, Wikipedia, nor some BS statistics. The fact of the matter is, that medicine isn't able to cure nor understand autoimmune diseases (arthritis,Guillain-Barre syndrome, etc). Hell, they can't even cure allergies. So, I'm not letting these charlatans to mess with my immune system. **** 'em!

I got a nasty marital strife with my wife, a physician, during the bird pig flu scare a while ago. She strongly insisted I get a flu shot, which I equally strongly refused. Our kids followed my example, thank Cthulhu. Well, I guess we all know how the flying pig flu fiasco ended, don't we?

I'm used to (and grudgingly acceptant of) Microsoft releasing iffy products and doing everything from gross fixes to little tweaks AFTER the products are in the marketplace....because they seem to usually get it usable around 'Service Pack 2' critical update. Big Pharma? They aren't showing up post-vaccination to remove (or even explain the presence of) mercury, monkey genes, et al in their periodic and always-rushed-to-market vaccines.Their population-wide, hysteria-induced campaigns always seem to disappear between one day and the next, a few months later (when the 'pandemic' of the moment turns out to cause less mortality than the generic colds/flus also going around at the time). Most vacccine-recipients I've known suffered 'flu-like symptoms' in the first days after their innoculation. I suppose your wife's occupation has her so far up the medical establishment's thought-collective that she couldn't imagine there being any profiteering and/or eugenics agendas attached to the annual death-flu scares. Good for your kids, BTW.....

So what's your point? What does this have to do with microsoft and its offerings?

…that a heart attack is better than cancer. You're still dead, and so is MSFT.

"Get top management that can demonstrate that it actually cares not just about its own wealth and power, but about the paying customers, the ordinary workers (who've been eating s..t sandwiches for years now) and the shareholders (just look at MSFT v. any benchmark you care to use over the last 10 years)."

I wouldn't hold my breath. There are too many companies, besides microsoft, that such executives already exist and thrive... only looking out for themselves (and their bonuses) and what the shareholders think of their profit margin.

"Meet the new Boss. Same as the old Boss." Those words, while not my own (and from the song, Won't get fooled again, by The Who) have so much truth to them. Your new board would be at the very least more than likely the same way, if not worse.

It's not that I don't agree with what you say, but it is more idealistic than reality based, perception set aside.

I recently bought myself a gaming / work-from-home computer, as my older machine all but told me it was about to die. As I was at the computer shop, I was asked what version of win7 I wanted. I was also told to be sure as Win7 home premium had a max of 16 gigs of ram, and I needed to pay 30$ more if I wanted to eliminate that limitation... I needed at least the "business" or corporate edition - whatever the name - which was 25% more expensive than "Home premium" (30/120=0.25). 25% price hike for the "privilege" of having more ram installed.

You want MS to have a good reputation? How about not putting some stupid, half-witted, money-grabbing limitation on their OS for a change. I still went for "home", as I figure my current 12 gigs is already enough to last me a while (at least until win7 will drop out of support). I made my choice, but it still irritates me beyond mesure knowing MS tried to grab money from me, based on an anti-feature constituted by an artificial limitation of ram.

If MS did care about their reputation, they wouldn't put a limit on how much ram you can have on your system. Physical / technical limitations of the hardware should be the only limit. Trying to get the customer to shell out more cash just because of RAM is not the way to go. Of course, I can name more irritants, but just this one is enough to damage MS reputation for me.

By the way, how in hell would Linux limit ram usage, and why? Does Apple ever do that? Seriously, I don't know if Apple ever tried limiting ram, but I guess they don't as they don't seem to have the "many-versions-of-OS-to-screw-you-over" scheme going.

P.S. Win7 is the best windows yet, I just don't like the stupid RAM limitation and have nothing flattering to say about that particular aspect.

The only ram limitations I've seen on Linux distributions is the hardware limit (eg. 3.5'ish gig limit on 32 bit hardware).

Apple is primarily a hardware company; I don't see them having an issue with selling you more Apple branded ram so I'd be rather shocked to find out osX had any sort of memory limit other than the physical hardware limitation. It's about hardware for apple, the OS is just embedded software they provide as part of the complete product.

Remember Microsoft is also the company that tried to retard the netbook market by defining "netbook" specs that hardware vendors had to remain within. The intent was probably to provide a line; cross it and you pay full OS license fees for "big-boy" laptops but stay under the imposed hardware limits and pay "little-boy" netbook OS license fees.

Win7 is nice too though. I held out a long while before going Win7 Pro. None of the "home" arbitrary limitations and I couldn't justify the price difference for Ultimate just to get full disk encryption versus running Truecrypt's proven FDE.

Get your facts straight, Neon Samurai. The RAM limit on 32-bit Linux is 64 GB, if you use the PAE kernel. Any single process, under the Linux PAE kernel, can access up to 16 GB of RAM at a time. Anyone can recompile their own Linux Kernel, and some distros, like PCLinuxOS, offer up multiple PAE Kernels, precompiled and ready to go. Try getting the equivalent of a PAE "kernel" from Microsoft for a home-based computer running the 32-bit version of Win7. I wish you luck on that.

no need to get all "get your facts straight". I was simply giving a quick answer based on standard OS kernels. standard 32bit OS max is about 3.5 gig of ram. The point was that there is not an intentional software imposed limit on addressable RAM as there is with Win7 Home versions. Being able to go beyond the the hardware imposed limit on addressable RAM is not really relevant to the thread topic but it is fantastic for you that you've been able to do so. For the Windows folks, there are also add-on options which get around the hardware's addressing limitation.

as the 32-bit version is capped at 4GB no matter what "edition" of Windows you use. Unfortunately not all software is available in a 64-bit version (thankfully the 32-bit versions still work), and one that is stable. Not to mention 16-bit code is immediately excluded from running in the 64-bit environment, if you have any code that old that you need to run, without an emulator of some kind.

Microsoft doesn't really clean up its act.

Instead it moves ahead and leaves in its wake a mess for us consumers.

For example is Win7 all that different from Vista? I don't really think so. It seems to me that they got rid of some things that posed a problem in Vista and rearranged what all the previous o.s.'s already had. Very little that is "new" was added to Win7.

So it Win8 going to be a blast into the future or just another business ploy of again removing what didn't work in Win7 and rearranging or repainting the same old features, like implementing the "Ribbon" globally?

Personally, i don't like the "Ribbon" in MSOffice and other programs anyways. It has many disadvantagous for productivity, though it might be visually entertaining to the rest of the world.

Thanks for mentioning that, I thought I was the only one whoo felt that the ribbon sucked. I would add those freaking taskbar popups. That required an hour of searching and implementing the work around, and for 60 minutes I purely hated Microsoft.

For example, why bother separating program files and program files (x86)
Why remove the edit command from WIndows 7
Why remove documents and settings, and why is the all users start menu in a completely different folder off the root of C then everyone elses.
Why is it that if an ODBC is made though command line, why can they not be edited through the GUI? Sure you can make and create them, but they are ignored until you use the command line to edit them again.
Why do network drive decide to be "disconnected" until a certain program (usually one with a drive list box) views the drive, then suddenly is available...
Why is the mouse not given a higher priority in the OS, In WIn95 it was given top priority, now that we are in Win7, I think its near the bottom.
Why is creating a folder within 2 menus? Nix distros figured this out (Top menu item off the start of the menu), why can't Windows?
Whats with that search box? Its smart enough to find programs, but its not smart enough to realize if you type
C:\Program Files\Microsoft
It will say, no such folder as C:\Program
But if you wrap it in quotes, it will open a search dialog searching for a file named
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft"
And on that note, why has this not been renamed to ProgramFiles so that quotes would no longer be needed?
Why is the all programs list still stuck inside the small confining window of the start menu, the start menu is the chief way to launch a program, I figured they would have corrected this mistake from Vista, I guess not. Maybe they assume people only have web browsers installed?

Excellent list, I would add that the clipboard controls don't work and involve uneccessary complexity even if it did.

http://www.gloverparkgroup.com/ ref:
http://www.tavistock.com/ ref:
How may one improve their reputation, when their every action just reminds them of investment groups that find conclusion there in Washington D.C.? The answer is by allowing the share holders to direct Microsoft and not any group with political influence.

In order for a company to position themselves number one, they need to segment their market and analyze what product or services they can offer and route a vast amount of resources for research and development towards it. Apple won the smartphone and tablet battle because they understood that workers didn't want to be confined to their desks anymore. Normal users want simplicity more than complexity in technology, unless you are a geek and like to tweak your OS and customize it. Microsoft has developed good products in the last decade, but in my opinion since Bill Gates left, the company lost the vision and the person that drove that vision for decades. Apple has been successful, not only because they saw the market opportunity and took advantage of it, but because Steve Jobs knows how to brainwash the masses and that is the power of persuasion you need to sell your products. They should fire Ballmer and bring someone with vision. I have used Google, Apple and MS products and all of them are good in their own realm. MS is great for business, Apple is great for home entertainment and simplicity and Google is somewhere in the middle, even though their products feels unfinished. For MS to succeed, they need to be a front page company with new visions and developments, in that arena Apple is winning, telling us that less and expensive is better.

I began my migration away from Microsoft products when they introduced XP- in fact I still have a couple of boxes running 98SE. Why?
1. I resent the fact that I have to spend considerable time "relearning" the basics when there are no clear benefits to migrating.
2. Lack of support for legacy software- all too often, applications that I rely on no longer work on newer versions of Windows. Had I completed the "upgrade" to XP, it would have cost me upwards of $5,000, just to get back to where I started from. I can still use the legacy software on a Linux box with virtualization.
3. Documentation is a joke, technical support for resolving issues is worse than a visit to the Dentist, and costs about as much.
4. Microsoft treats customers very, very poorly, and what passes for an "on line support community" is cliquish and results in more insults than assistance.

How to fix this?

1. Focus on customer service, and provide useful documentation.
2. Provide continuity between versions. Support for legacy applications is a MUST.
3. Don't release products that are not ready for prime time.
4. Abandon the concept that we little people are only interested in stealing your products.

With Bill Gates departure and Ballmer in charge, nothing but horrible things happen. Buying Aquantive for $6 billion and another $8 billion for Skype is sure a true sign for big spender and no planning. I can understand Aquantive is something local and potential big revenue, but Skype? Microsoft has enough talent to create a software just like Skype but choose not to. To get the market share? Heard of other fast growing use of free video conferencing software like Tango?

Here's what I think will help:
Get rid of the guy in charge now. A CEO needs to have charm and magic, like Steve Jobs, while Ballmer has yet to show any sign of that.

Diversify it's business with different branding. It's not easy to salvage the once best brand name and instead of spend billions more to speed up the recovery, diversify it with newer brand. Like Toyota and Scion, like Microsoft did with xbox. Does anyone call it by it's full name Microsoft xbox? No, everyone go with just xbox and knowing Microsoft is behind it. Leave Microsoft as a core software developing company focus on OS and enterprise software, with a full road map.

Give people more hopes that the cool stuff came out from their lab actually have a chance to see the light or getting adoption.

Have the understanding that it can't touch everything and when it can't, it has to embrace it. The zune was a perfect example of standing no chance at all being in the market that late compare to iPod. The money spent there can easily go to somewhere else where they can find a new front.

Count how many fail products they have within the last 5 years. I can already think of 5 big ones and consider how to do a damage control over it's own employee about so many fail decisions. It used to be cool to work with Microsoft but word the street sure said a different tone now. The people who worked there are hardworking, but also fail to see the light outside the office and be innovative and competitive.

While Windows 7 is a decent product, Microsofts support of the product leaves much to be desired. I have been having difficulties with Windows explorer which often stops working, and has to be restarted (most often when using the right click menu to perform an action). The Action Center detects this and offers a solution (downloading and installing an old update) which I have done, and it resolves nothing....Upon researching this problem, I found that hundreds of thousands of Win7 and Vista users have the same problem, and there is no solution other than a reinstall of the OS. How can Microsoft not come up with a solution for this widespread problem? (short of a re-installation of the OS)
I've been a staunch Windows fan for 15 years, and have become used to Windows OS bugs, but this has really got my goat...Other than being more secure, what the heck does Win7 have over XP.

Try Linux Gnome or even KDE and you will forever be a born-again OS user. The only epiphany that I ever came across while using Windows was an "out-of-money experience". Buy a laptop nowdays and demand a Linux installation and its total price will drop significantly - why? The total price of the laptop includes the price of a Microsoft Windows OS embedded and hidden from public scrutiny, not unless you are tech savy to know better.

" Buy a laptop nowdays and demand a Linux installation and its total price will drop significantly.."

Nope, because you'd be hard-pressed to find a laptop without windows on same. Typically, there is no option of "drop OS." And if there is, there is no discount associated with it. The large majority of GNU/Linux praiseboyz are skilled enough to make repair of their PC or OS should it go south. That's just not the way it is in the call center / business world in which we live, however.

essentially correct.

Actually yes it will. First of all, you won't ever have to pay for a higher windows license then you need, just the cheapest. Second, Linux doesn't have the bloat that M$ has. Basically, to run Linux today you only need a machine powerful enough to run XP. That means that a $300 laptop will perform almost as well as a $1000 laptop does. With M$, that is not true. If you use 64-bit Linux, this is even more of the case. You save money on hardware because you get a higher level of performance. For unskilled users there are friendly versions of Linux like Mint or even PC-BSD (which is UNIX not Linux) that also have a powerful command line as the user's skills increase.

Last time I wended my way down the high street for a new box, the only OS choice was the lowest level windows one. When I said that wasn't what I wanted, they just shrugged and said take it or leave it. I left it.

I went to a specialist box builder, bought what I wanted not what Acme inc wanted to sell me. I paid for that service though.

Got to stop looking at this issue from the point of view of a technical enthusiast, and start looking at it from a business point of view. How many linux distros would you offer pre -installed, what level of support would you provide. Tell me I'm getting Ubuntu on it, and I'll walk out the door as fast I did when you offered me @Home. Ma and Pa use won't care. And the price will be the same or more anyway, because everybody "knows" windows.

We can do this stuff becasue we are not relying as heavily or even at all on vendor support, that's why it's cheaper / better value for money for us.

Most callcenter techs have extreme difficulty in grasping your problem, though you have prepared it in any number of approaches to provide for the disparity in the grasp of English. Then they look up something that has a word in it that you mentioned - just like on-line help does-and leads you into a completely different universe. I must admit this means of interstellar travel seems to work partially, except for the navigation part! Shoulda packed a sandwitch!

Break off the OS from the Apps. Two different houses. Preferably two different companies but a completely split development would be nice.

Another great way to improve their standing would be to release Windows code and make it open source. That would be a huge help to make MS better in my mind anyway.

Listemn to what people want, and offer products that don't have excessive amounts of control just for the sake of control.
A good example is the excellent libraries function in Win 7, hobbled by a limit of only 50 folders. Why limit it? What possible purpopse is served by controlling the numbers?
Finally of course, charge upgrade prices, not new prices every time.
MS basically is an over-controlling and greedy corporation with it's own interests at heart and not it's customers.

Back in 1969, IBM was forced to unbundle when there was competition (IBM and the seven dwarfs). Prior to that, IBM used to give away the S/W (source and object) for "free" (cost was buried in the H/W price). They were also forced to start pricing S/W not deemed essential to drive the H/W (OS, IOS, Assembler and certain utilities). Granted, Microsoft is not a PC manufacturer, but it basically "forces" the PC makers to install only MS with its pricing practices. It also "bundles" its S/W. It also plays too much frivolous "hardball" over non-sensical patent" issues (personally, all S/W patents should be scrapped as the "horses had left the barn" years before. While most S/W is useful and advances the state of the art, if always seems to fail the test of "non-obvious". That has always been a problem when you have an overwhelmed, grossly undertrained patent office that hasn't a clue to the gobbledygook stated in most patents.

Microsoft is too big. Like many large companies, they have lost their ability to be nimble, creative and they have become extremely arrogant acting like they know more and better than their customers.

Google is beginning to behave in the same way.

They need to break it up into smaller relevant companies and give the companies the freedom to innovate.

When a company reaches a certain size, the people running it get monopolistic thinking. Whether or not they are a monopoly is not relavent... they think and act as though they are. The size where this occurs also varies, but eventually a company's head becomes so big that they deceide to do things for their benefit rather than the customer's. The justification for this becomes "What are they gonna do, go somewhere else?"

The trouble is that that is precisely what they will do. That is precisely what we did.

It's always been the Microsoft way or no way. You have to use their bundled products, regardless of whether you want them or not, and they usually weren't the best either. Microsoft customers have no choice, except to choose something else that is being sabotaged and deviously undermined by a greedy monster.

Microsoft simply has no respect for their clients - their approach is top down, and clients are right at the bottom, unimportant except as a source of revenue! I, and many people I know, have felt unimportant, waiting expectantly for the latest product, knowing that you are going to have pay through the nose for comparatively little value.

The monolith is too far removed from the customer.

Microsoft has bad reputation. Yes off course there are some mistakes by Microsoft Like Vista and other mobile based not popular programs. But yet Company has so many potential to do more.

Some of the suggestions I must give for Microsoft Corporation

1) I agree with dev@ You must have respect for your clients Microsoft has no respect for their clients. Even I have faced so many times when i have some issue in my windows 7.
2) Try to make Good products for home users like Windows 7 Is good But still so many things that a normal user cannot use. Microsoft has successfully launched so many good products for enterprise level user but still fail to develop any product specially for home users.
3) Try launch a product like i mac with full supported software's no need to install any other product. via doing this they prevent piracy of their software's and OS.

Most everyone has a good point (or eleven:)
I will concentrate on the GUI, since this is what most users really care about.

@databaseben
Yes, the 'Ribbon' sucks, really bad...

Having used and supported MS Windows since Ver. 3.1 and Office from Ver. 2000,
I can say that the (major) changes to the UI have been the biggest slap in my face.
I personally dislike to learn a 'new' way of doing the same old thing.
And my business customers like it even less.
Many hours and many dollars have been wasted in 're-learning' the menu layouts.

It wouldn't be so hard to make the UI be 'all things' to 'all people'.
Leave it similar, or provide a way to revert to 'classic' menus...
Quit forcing 'new' things down customers throats!
People tend to learn ways to operate a UI and get comfortable with their skill set,
MS must understand this about basic human nature, before any real faith will be bestowed upon them.

Oh, and BTW...
MS would really make a hit if they released an OS that didn't have to be fixed for it's entire life cycle!
For instance, if I had a product, let's say a car... that had to be 'fixed' every month (read 'updates'),
during it's 4 or 5 year lifespan, I would have a lemon on my hands.
Every time they 'fix' the OS. after it has been sold,
a check should be cut to the person who bought the incomplete product.
Get off your A$$, MS and give us our moneys worth!

Like both of your Step 7's...

Schools are the place to shine...
I have worked with school boards that were trying to run XP with 256 MB's of RAM!
Ridiculous...
I don't care who you are, large grants to schools, always make for a good rep.

And a free copy of the OS or App you have certified on would be a nice gesture.

Apple figured out the school thing, then lost their way. MS has the opportunity to do so, but won't. What's left? Lots of schools are moving to Linux. This bothers me because they are moving to a platform for economic rather than technical reasons.

Someone at MS needs to figure out that they need to support education, both for the children who will become users of what they are familiar with and for the IT Pro who will support these users.

The key to Microsoft's early (mid 1980's) unprecedented ability to over come the Mac OS, despite being technologically inferior, was the relatively cheap price for hardware and software as well as user friendly licensing. Those elements attracted both developers and users. Microsoft was a lean. mean fighting machine with a 'Can do' attitude. They also had a 'Must do to survive' attitude, which drove their culture. I believe the latter was also a key in their longevity, which has been lost and replaced by the attitude of 'We have so many products now that we can afford to let this product go/fail'.
There are many other issues besides these but when you look back at what made them great and the trasition to what they are now, size matters.

Norm

Yes, we yanks like to complain. Go to any bar on a Friday night and you will hear more complaints that even a dour Scotsman can muster. We even make songs about it which we buy in enormous quantities. Armchair quarterbacking is a national pastime.

That said, the purpose of the post was to give Microsoft the tools they need to survive over the next 20 years. I doubt they will listen though, as this trend has be adequately demonstrated over the last 13 years. Still, I felt I must try as well as possibly give another a road map to follow in order to become the next big thing.

As far as MS being responsible for us all having computers and Internet, etc... That's like saying that without Edison we'd all be beating rock together in a dark cave. While Microsoft's contribution to technological advancement should not be overlooked, when a concept or problem presents itself, solutions manifest, not the other way around. If Microsoft didn't step up, someone else would have. Further, the Internet was not based upon Microsoft technology, but rather UNIX. Microsoft was loathe to adopt the Internet at first until they realized that if they did not, someone else would.

Good article, Ms. DLS.

I think they should start by reading this and its comments. I get the impression they could give a crap.

I have too many gripes with the OS to list, but a few of my big ones are those behind the "Windows Genuine Advantag" crap. I buy every damned copy of the OS I use. Always have. I have had so many issues with MS telling me my OS is illegal I want to bomb their headquarters.

There are 20 different versions of their current OS. Starter, Home, Premium, Professional, Universal, Oceanic, Prostitute, Communist, Overlord, Polycarbonate...whatever. Screw that. For $29, OSX is the same for all Apple boxes. WHy, o why would I ever pay $300 for an OS? Only to have to pay it again for Win8? Get real!

To the presumption that MS invented the tablet, though, are you serious?? Newton, anyone? Perhaps more PDA than tablet, it was directly compared against the iPad by the first folks who correctly predicted that it would fare as poorly as the Newton.

Just an aside....MS didn't even invent windows, for crissakes. I used the equivalent of Win98 on a Mac Lisa in 1986-7. I call bullsh*t. What PCs were out there were running DOS.

I still use XP. Won't change. But when my PC mercifully, if ever, dies, it's OSX for me. On Apple hardware. MS is a stock play as far as I am concerned, not a reason to buy an OS. It's just not worth the headaches.

They were there for the first revolution, and benefitted nicely. They missed the latest one and will pay for their ways. I am not sure they can recover. It's like some high school kid boxing Mohammed Ali in his best days. MS is off balance and getting beat up, hard.

To quote Michael Dell, perhaps MS should sell it off and return the money to the shareholders.

My experience with Microsoft operating systems dates back to DOS. Certainly I did not have experiences with every version of Windows since then, but several versions later (including 4 weeks with VISTA and a year with Win 95) I have one consistent complaint, as much related to Office versions as to the operating systems. Both have failed equally, over time, through introduction of more and more complex changes in the interface. Even Windows 7 combined with Office 2010, which everyone seems to be giving high marks to, is a thorn in my side after 8 weeks with it. Tasks in office, that used to require two clicks, now take as many as five, (and I really don't care what anyone says, it is buggy as hell). I could regale you with story after story of chasing solutions to problems, non sensical work arounds, wading through endless lists of faqs and help files that never seem to arrive at a solution, listening to recordings for 40 minutes while waiting for a support person, ... the whole damn catastrophe (with apologies to Zorba). Then, more recently, there was the frustration of being caught between Dell & Microsoft pointing fingers at each other while I was suspended in that awful place of trying to meet a deadline and being hopelessly stuck. It turned out to be Microsoft that owned the problem, and I doubt I will ever forgive them for that lost day. But in the end, what I dislike the most, is being forced to adopt a new version of office where nothing is familiar, or a new operating system that requires weeks of experience to feel even a part of the way towards former proficiency. (Adding insult to injury they call it "productivity" software.) These are the reasons that I have, out of defense, begun protracting our PC refresh cycle. The longer I can draw it out, the better I feel. It is far better to dance with the devil I know than the one I don't. But frankly, I'lll go through it all one more time. My wife recently bought an Apple laptop and had had nothing but praise. I have sat down with it several times and I admire the ease with which I began to pick up the differences. I do not like to admit it but there may be an Apple induction in my future. It will be done, if at all, out of desperation.
Microsoft, first of all, needs to respect it's customer base...XP should have been an option on new PCs at least through 2011. Secondly, they must absolutely stop the crapware delivery practice that forces us to spend hours removing products we don't want. (Windows Media for example, "post-it" notes, MSN, IE, etc.) They must never allow a costomer to be suspended with a support problem between themselves and an OEM. I agree with one observer: they need to start focusing on what they should be doing best i.e. productivity and operating systems. They haven't done anything else that is noteworthy in my opinion. I dread the thought of what they will do to one of my favorite apps - Skype.

For me, it would take a few things. First and most importantly, MS should stop pseudo-innovating in segments where it really doesn't have any use value to add. When there is a perfectly good non-MS product on top of a competitive market, why go there?

Second, pricing and / or openness. As a result of MS muscling out WordPerfect et al years ago, pretty much anyone trying to do anything remotely serious desperately needs to have Office. OO have made a good run at creating an alternative, but MS (naturally enough, I guess) haven't made it easy. Why is there no really affordable, basic version of Office, selling at 40 or 50 bucks?

Lastly, same point really, price of the OSs. Vista sucked, but Win7 upgrade for my four PCs (one Vista and three XP, all bought in the last three years) would cost about $550. Way too much. Re Vista in particular -- It's like the US car companies. They spat out a lot of lemons, and never made it right. Ergo, people don't by US cars like they used to.

The 3 pack to upgrade to 7 goes for around $125

I've been waiting for someone to spring that old canard. @rholden, you either are a troll, or you are incredibly obtuse. No one says they resent Microsoft for making money, but when a company corners a customer, the result of which is usury, the customer can and should complain bitterly. Wait, let me explain it to you so that you will understand. Do you like being told "no tickee, no washee" even after you have paid through the nose. Please, no more idiotic canards.

OK, here is what I was trying to infer. Not one post before yours complains about MS making money. And not that it is any more appropos than your earlier post, but I have no problems with you making money with Linux desktops. (Good luck with that.) Certainly I feel cornered (and abused) per my earlier post.. Read it, 5 posts back. Not a whimper about MS making money. I do complain when I fork over $500 bucks only to find that the new system and apps are buggy, and overly complex.

NT

(He makes an implication; you take an inference)

I have heard that for the last few years, yet Linux still loses. The only UNIX that has any chance at taking the desktop is Mac OS/X. Let's just face it, Linux is dead.

Linux doesn't have to *win* in order to stay alive. Enough people like it well enough to use it. Now if Windows was as cheap as most Linux distros, they would probably start losing their grip on the market, because they couldn't advertise and they couldn't made the sweetheart deals with the OEMs. People who don't care about having control over their own systems will probably stay with Windows because it is flashier. People who want control over their own computers will probably opt for a Linux distro that allows it. People will also opt to save money on applications as well, and can browse and download hundreds absolutely *free* of charge. Most allow you to alter them any way you want to customize them to your special needs. MS will do anything they can get away with to discourage you from doing this up to allowing their system to crash and blaming your software, or even have their OS remove or destroy it. So if your trust leaving the fox to guard your henhouse, and like buying apps the fox approves at inflated prices, stay with Windows and MS products.

you and rfolden are just shills.

You can ask any price you want. But if you're the only one who can bottle it and demand far more than it is truly worth, expect people to *complain like hell*. We may buy your product, but don't expect *us* to do *you* any favors like telling people how great you are.

...or plan for the long haul. Most ways to clean up in the short term (early part of a business's 'life cycle') will have repercussions on its reputation in the long run....

A huge number of bankers, those fellows who helped throw our economies in the toilet, don't even mention the dot commers...

A business' reputation for making money is akin to an assasins' reputation for making people dead, 'cept their victims don't whinge as much...

A banker or a wanker?

...a nobody.

We might have had a PC and software industry that was actually, you know, competitive , like the one I started working in back around '81 and '82. By '87 or thereabouts, the 'market' was a culture-free monoculture, and we've all been standing around for the last 25 years seeing how high MSFT can bounce the rubble this time.

They did what every predatory monopolist does: establish unrivalled hegemony, and then bleed the marks dry. It worked for Standard Oil, it worked for Ma Bell, and it's been allowed to work for Microsoft. Even a pathologically, self-gloriously clueless CEO can't manage to completely sink the company, though he's done some amazing things to the market cap. ('Improvements' would be a nice alternative to 'amazing things', yes?)

I run a software company I started back then. It was a horrible pain and difficult to sell when you needed the DEC version, the Perkin-Elmer version, the TI version the DATA General version with different diskette formats and sometimes keyboard and screen codes. MS-DOS came out, Novell 2 settled down and it was off to the races.

I tried promoting a Linux version in Red Hat 5/6/7 days and never made a sale. I've given up. I'll be retired by the time *nix makes a desktop OS that will take a single executable across all versions. Software we made in the early 80s runs fine on Win 7 - 32 and I expect it will work on Win 8 - 32 as well.

You tried to sell Linux. You don't sell Linux because anyone who would buy knows they can get it for free. Sell the service and maintenance contract. Value Add.

...

There seems to be a bit of the negative going around today, eh?

I don't mind someone disagreeing with me, in fact I like it, especially if they can make a cogent argument against. This flyby negging crap is for cluless wimps.

Truth f'ing hurts huh?
You sad bastard.

Win 8 32.
Sofware that works just fine written in the 80's that works in win7. Define "works" ....

...As long as he can get a C:/ prompt!

windows came out, so I'd be where I am now pretty much...

Too many programs still crash, printer connections and other devices disappear, networking different Windows versions is haphazard, libraries obfuscate and complicate access to data, desktop icons lose their graphic... Having data buried deep inside the "System Folders" renders them inaccessible when Windows fail to start for any reason. The amount of the initial set up gymnastics to separate data and programs on their own logical disks grows with each new Windows "version". Windows 7: My Windows LAST.

"Whether or not the reputation is deserved, it takes consistent action to counteract it."

There were more than enough examples in the article to convince anyone that the reputation IS deserved, and there are many more examples that would show Microsoft's consistency over a period of decades, not just years.

Having been burned many times by Microsoft's disasters, I have learned to "wait and see" with MS. It will be years before I would consider believing their marketing hype again. I don't think I'll live long enough to trust a MS product less than a year old.

Who created the "bad image" of Microsoft?

Where are all the "anti" articles coming from? It's all the press and the media. Do you believe they are independent? Planet wide there are probably 2 or 3 individuals controlling the ALL of the newspapers, TV, internet news etc of the entire planet Earth. Independent outcry of objective nature against poor Microsoft? Hardly. It's a campaign.

By 2005, Microsoft had become too powerful and too independent and had to be a pain point for some who wish to control this planet here.
How much money does Microsoft have to loan from banks? It's probably the biggest company in the world with next to no bank loans. At least until Windows XP. And just as Gaddafi is the victim of the international bankers, reigning one of the few countries which are not under the thumb of bankers by way of state debts, so it might the fate of this company to be under attack from the same source.

An enormous upsurge of viruses occured after Windows XP hit the market, forcing Microsoft into never-ending defense. Where do you think these viruses are coming from? Some geeky back courtyard hackers with long hair? Hardly. FBI and CIA would be a better guess. And the guys, which, in turn are behind the FBI and CIA.

Who financed the upsurge of Apple, after it had been next to bankrupt a decade ago? How do you invest into a gigantic infrastructure with 500,000 workers in China at huge buildings to make the iPods and iPads? Like everyone does - through loans, which make the richest banks even richer, with every penny you need to "invest".

So no, you don't repair the image of Microsoft if they are against a concerted campaign by the real powers that be. Unless they concede. Microsoft is, just like countries as Syria, Greece, Ireland and soon Portugal, just a small puppet in a power game.

Keep watching Conspiracy Theory... maybe one day one of them will be right.

are gits, you pretty much shot down the point you were trying to make faster than Gadaffi knocks off those foolish enough to disagree wth him...

If an election were held in Stockholm today to favor or oppose MS's practices, who would win? Do you *really* believe that the popular opinion of MS is dictated by bankers? Man, I can't breathe fast enough to count all the errors in your thought process!

Please tell them to send me a job application. I'd like to found a religion to give them the praise such incredibly powerful people deserve. I have experience here, I used to be a Mormon!

This'll get marked down, want it?

MicroSoft? Non-factor. Along with Apple, it has over-priced, bloated products that I no longer want. I'm not 'in the industry', just an older guy who has to use computers and has learned to enjoy them. Three years ago, in desperation, I looked for the stability of the Macs without the price tag and OpenSuse became my solution. I mastered the learning curve and was freed from the tyranny of M$ (I use computers all day for my work, with browsers and email being the smallest part of that). So I could care less about MicroSoft. I must confess, I do smile when I hear border guards firing up their computers and the Windows jingle comes on - talk about security at the border.

One big issue for Vista was the reactivation of the OS key - repeatedly. This caused quite a stir. That is the primary reason I dumped Vista. I had the product running on a PC capable of all Vista had to offer. Re-activating Vista the 4th time was one time too many with the support call to MS. Dumped it!!!! Back to XP Pro until MS came out with something better. (Your mileage will vary)
It reminded me of my 1987 Ford Ranger pickup. Everyone I have spoken to who drives Fords likes them. However, I had a BAD experience with my pickup and a worse experience with the service/warranty issues on it. That caused me to steer clear of Fords in general. That angst has lasted 20+ years and I am finally willing to give them another chance - although they don't make Jeep Wranglers - their loss! Vista was the same. I regret paying MS for Vista. I resent the fact that MS has geared their products to force people to upgrade. Asking folks to upgrade and offering an upgrade exciting enough to make me want it is FAR different than forcing me to upgrade because you will no longer support older OS's and you will no longer sell them. Make me WANT the product, and make the upgrade pricing tempting enough to swing me. I think another factor that impacts them is that there will be many businesses who skipped Vista and will not be able to leverage upgrade pricing. As for Software Assurance... nothing MS does gets me as riled as that! It like a bank forcing me to pay a double mortgage on parts of my house in order to have them bulldoze down those parts and replace them every 10 years (during a 30 year motgagbe.) MS software assurance is no less than extortion. Upgrades should not be overhauls. Are you going to keep that computer longer than three years?

Don't get me started on MS OSs which should never have made it out of the developer's hands.
The biggest MS foul-up is BETA TESTING on paying customers private or corporate. 95 which did not become stable until 98SE and a series of service packs. Straight 98 had the "auto crach BSOD feature. ME which was a "down grade to pencil and paper" and Vista which was ME the second. MS says get the money and then make code which works occassionally. DOS 5.1 and XP SP3 are/were the most trusted MS OSes in my experience. I'm glad that flavors of LINUX are stomping on MS's toes. Having run a dual boot XP/UBUNTU on a ME box which was set in the trash by a neighbor has sold me on LINUX concepts of "do more with less HW $".

Let me say first that I am a lifelong fan of MS products. They are top notch in a great many respects. In recent dealings with customer service, they have been responsive, professional and almost overwhelmingly attentive. I like participating with a company that gives the impression that I am one of their most valued customers.
In addition, as an organization, I don't see any other for-profit corporation making the kind of effort that MS does in helping to promote education, increase knowledge of its user base and try to be a good citizen. There are plenty of non-profits which do not do half as good a job at trying to make the world a better place. As a wealthy philanthropist, I know of few individuals who put so much a proportion of their money where their mouth is as Bill Gates.
People get frustrated with their products when things do not go right, but tend to forget how much more we are able to accomplish thanks to the contributions of MS to the world of computing. I think this anger toward MS says a lot more about us than it does about the company itself.
Companies make mistakes and missteps, just like people. I am not advising that people blindly trust Ballmer or Gates, but the next time you actually deal with a MS employee, try to be a little objective and give them a fair shake. They are on the right track and heading in the right direction, it remains to be seen whether that will work for them. I wish them the best.

>"People get frustrated with their products when things do not go right,..."

Things would go swimmingly if MS would allow them to, but they assume they know better than me how I should use my computer. Each release of a new OS allows less and less personal autonomy. It's the built-in limitations, the assumption that I have no authority to control my own network, or that I must check with someone else to load my preferred software, of that I don't have the right to view my own files, et c. & et c. Frustrated? angry?, well yeah!

>"I think this anger toward MS says a lot more about us"

Tell me, just what is it saying about "us"? What do you hear it saying? That we are, well, somewhat biased against MS?

I can't speak for "us", I can only speak for myself. Microsoft sell a fine product with many good traits. The graphics are outstanding. Uh, lets see. Oh, yeah, lots of commercially available software. Mmm, did I say good graphics? Oh, I said that.

>"next time you actually deal with a MS employee, try to be a little objective and give them a fair shake."

Oh, I'm objective. The object of my call is to find out what I can do about so-and-so. "Oh, you say my Windows is pirated?" "You want me to send you a copy of my sales receipt?" "Is Office Max an authorized MS dealer?" "What do you mean, 'Your computer is not the one that copy is registered to?" "No, I can't read the COA on the bottom of my laptop." "Yes, the computer is out of warranty. I thought you supported your software through 2012." "yes, please do have your supervisor call me ASAP." "Monday?" "Sure, I'll run on Linux until he calls. Thank you."

>"They are on the right track and heading in the right direction,..."

I'm glad to know that, I'll send them a post card to congratulate them.

I am a user, not a developer.
Has Microsoft offended me? Yes, there are times when I could have verbally "punched out" Bill Gates when some of his "less than stable" OS's have made my life difficult.
Does Microsoft have to "clean-up-its bad-reputation" ?
No!
This character assignation is simply the last resort of professional technical writers who have nothing intelligent to write (and need the money).
Microsoft is simply a well managed company which is under fierce pressure to produce a next generation product in competition with the best and brightest minds in the world.
Microsoft wins a few, loses a few and occasionally delivers a product prematurely.
Writers would better serve the world if they would focus their constructive juices on the enhancement of existing products and exploring future technologies rather than playing dog-in-the-manger.

Everyone may have their own opinion but 'How can Microsoft clean up its bad reputation?' Is not character assignation(Sic)/'assassination?'
The replies sometimes are.

#1. STOP FORCING CHANGES!!! This starts at the GUI level and ESPECIALLY applies to the control panel. It is stupid to have to relearn how to configure an OS from scratch every time a new version comes out. Smart marketing makes it _easy_ for customers to continue to use your products - not more difficult. I'm not saying not to innovate, but allow your USERS to pick the skin/interface, including the ability to use the interface from the previous version. This goes double for that stupid ribbon.
recap: STOP changing/burying all the control panel/administrative stuff. STOP changing the "documents" name/location. STOP forcing me to use a new desktop UI with every new version. It's MY computer, let me use it the way that makes sense to ME!

#2. Versions. Go to one (1) version of the OS and make _every_ difference be an installed software program. Simple, easy to support, and WAY less headache. Want Bitlocker? $5 at Microsoft's online store. Want support for shadow volumes or an encrypted hard drive? Another $5. You get the idea.

#3. Apply #2 to Microsoft Office. Cut out a lot of the extra features that 99% of people don't use and slash the price. For those that want Excel's Solver or VB support, let them install it as an add-on and charge them another $5. MS is going to lose the battle with OpenOffice on price if it doesn't start offering a more competitive version that doesn't cost $250.

#4. Simplify business licensing. Toss your entire current licensing plan out the window and start over. Offer tiered costs where licenses up to X cost this much, licenses up to Y cost less, etc. When a sales rep has to attend an all-day seminar on Microsoft licensing and still can't explain how it works to me, it's too complicated.

#5. STOP trying to build everything into the OS. Applications are good. Bloat is bad. If a customer doesn't need it, it shouldn't be installed. Period. Start with bare bones and enable things going forward. Light and fast is the ticket to beating the perpetual hardware cycle requiring 2x the memory and 2x the hardware of the last version just to operate efficiently.

#6. Standards: Support them. It's time you understood that your monopoly is over. It's time to support standards - in documents, the file system and on the Web. It's okay to play nice with the other children.

#7. Internet Explorer is NOT a critical upgrade - ESPECIALLY when it is tied into the OS!!! EVERY version of IE has caused me professional upgrade heaches. 5.01, 5.5, 6, 7, 8... every one of them have caused one of my mission-critical programs to break. This is bad enough on the client side, but on the server side there is no excuse. Internet Explorer is NOT a critical upgrade. Or at least it wouldn't be such a nightmare if it weren't tied into the OS... Your fault, MS, but we're the ones who have to pay for it.

#8. Add support for multiple desktops. *nix has had this feature since the GUI was added. This seems so obvious to me that it is a perfect candidate for inclusion natively in the OS. Couple this with multiple-monitor support and monitor profiles for laptop users and you have a feature businesses truly love.

#9. Get rid of Ballmer. Microsoft needs a new, softer face if it is going to really make a difference. MS needs someone less publicly hard-nosed and pompous than Ballmer and someone who can focus and strategize. Ballmer doesn't make the cut. Get someone like Meg Whitman.

#10 Segment. Stop trying to be everything to everyone. This goes with #1, #2, #5, etc. This is a failing tactic. Focus on one customer segment and go after what they want. This is basic marketing 101 and the main reason Apple is the driving force in portable music, phones, and tablet devices. They _focused_. Microsoft can get away with not having any strategic vision, but they have to stay agile enough to buy ideas and compete, and that means not trying to so tightly integrate everything together that they lose time-to-market.

#11. Increase value. I still remember the days when my dad brought home an HP RS-20 with Windows 3.1 and MS Word. Finally - a word processor I didn't have to memorize 80 function-key combinations to use and a windowed-environment in which to use it! Since then, Microsoft has ramped the cost outrageously, but not delivered the cost back to the user in value. Software updates are not a value to the user: they expose things you should have done right the first time. New features aren't _valuable_ unless people actually use them - forcing everyone to pay for features only 1% actually use is aggravating to the users. And being forced to buy a new computer every time you put out a new OS is a tragedy - and not just from an environmental standpoint. Focus on providing value - a basic tenet of business.

Across the board, Microsoft would greatly benefit by stopping the rush to the door. Ever since Win 1.0 Microsoft has rushed to release a product, including Windows 7, XBox, IE, Word, Excell, Powerpoint, (find one that they didn't). If they pursue the "Get it out there and fix it on the fly" attitude their Bad Rap will continue to get worse.
While I am not so worried about an old ap running on the new OS, the new aps for the new OS absolutely must be able to read the old ap's data. Never again do I want to have to go to an outside, competing product to translate data to make it compatible with the new Microsoft application, when it was created by an old Microsoft application. One generation is not enough. Data archives sit around for years, do not make me convert everything every couple of years just to keep up with some company's bad decisions.
Software piracy: Microsoft - why would I want to steal any of your products, when I can get better stuff for free?
Upgrades: Microsoft - stop using my computer, internet connection, ram, hard drive, etc. more than I do. When I last looked at my XP machine it had 11gigs of updates from Microsoft cleverly hidden on the hard drive.
And - what fool decided to put everything in a single "registration database?" Anything at all happen while that monstrosity is being updated (like at sign off) and your machine is essentially good only for linux, or a $400 to $500 re-install of Windows.

If the mad product rush is a chicken, their long-held development philosophy is the egg. Even if you're as non-technical as Elmer Fudd, stop over in the software section of your local book warehouse and leaf through 'Code Complete'. The basic idea is that, as early as possible, they have a product that they can ship with a straight face. The features don't all work, the app may blow up your system or eat your thirdborn the first Tuesday you run it, but they can "truthfully" say that everything they (most recently) promised is "in there".

But they don't close the circle. In order to have everything "in there", lots of decisions are made earlier than they "should" be. Many, many internal dependencies -- pieces that depend on other pieces working a certain way, which then have other pieces depending on them -- get "cast in concrete" and can't be changed, often more for political than technical reasons. So when something breaks, often because they either tried to do research-as-product-development, but more often because you've got all these political animals that have to justify their organisational superiority over the people who actually do the work, there's a ripple effect. Think of a Russian matryoshka doll, but instead of nested dolls, they're nested bombs , each detonating the one immediately outside it. Who's standing outside the last one, catching the full force of the explosion? Why that would be you, Mr Sucker (oh, I mean 'Mr Consumer'). Read Markets are Conversations to get a better understanding of what I'm talking about here.

So, to start shipping great products, they'd have to completely erase and rebuild from scratch the internal political and organisational structure of the company and replace everything they know about how to build software with modern techniques. I've got a better chance of winning the lottery every week for the next year, and I'm not planning on buying any tickets.

Pay offtechnical debt by making your customers pay for a new version.
It's not politics, it's commerce.
If you can get your customers to pay again, why the hell not?

Whether you're talking about financial or technical debt, making steady payments on small recurring debt is almost always better than waiting until you're so deep in the hole you've dug that you forget what this 'daylight' stuff people keep talking about is. I've heard several non-developer, non-analyst people publicly wish that Microsoft would fix what's already broken at least as fast as they introduce new features. I can understand the feeling; I've shared it myself at different times. But to dig out of a hole this deep, Microsoft would need a leadership team that really put priorities on improvement and steady progress, rather than change for its own sake. Unfortunately, we're stuck with Steve and friends. $5 a share by 2014, anyone?

Unfortunately in business land debts can be sold....
Don't have to take my mittens to count the number of times they've both agreed with me and let me do something about it though...
You evre worked anywhere were paying off the debt gets a priority, only happened once in my career, and that's because I was pretty much in charge. Also it was a 24/7 manufacturing environment so the costs were readily apparent, and I managed to stick some real numbers on the consequences, like downtime and production losses and such.

The places I've worked where tech debt has been something which executive management agreed was relevant were all in at least one of three groups: Startups that were doing a "Product X done right", where Product X was another company's product that had very publicly taken the wheels off the company because it was such utter crap; as you allude to, utilities and financial orgs that have to have systems Just Work 24/7/365 or else Really Bad Things™ happen; or skunkworks projects that produced a 1.0 where we had to get 1.1/2.0 done right and quick to avoid becoming Scenario #1. I would argue that the first scenario is something that can happen to any shop. Complacency may not cause your project to kill actual people, but it can kill actual jobs — like yours.

Recent experiences with Microsoft have been abysmal - customer service simply hanging up if they don't want to give an answer to Microsoft simply taking a paid for Win 7 Ultimate package saying "you are not entitled to it". They are a law unto themselves and the customer / end user is just money to them. If you go against them they will use legal process or threat thereof to silence you. If possible I would never use Microsoft again but unfortunately a couple of essential programs only work in MS Windows. Microsoft have a long way to go to ever convince me to use their products like I once used to. I am now using APPLE much of the time. Apple OS is far more reliable!

I dropped most MS products like a hot potato many years ago, and I have no intention to return to be tied up with them any time soon in the future. What always upset me was the fact that when you purchase one product from Microsoft, you are married with the rest of their products for ever. Look at .Net technology, aside from DotNetNuke and the open source mono project, everything needs to run on a Microsoft Server, which is much unstable and reliable than, say, a Unix based server, that needs less resources to run in. Microsoft service is terrible and expensive, i.e. just try giving them a call for technical support .... yeah, good luck.

1. Don't put out a new OS version until the previous one actually works.
2. Don't charge for a new release of a product that really should have been a Service Pack. For instance, Office 2010 is the refinement of 2007.
3. Don't release software without doing proper testing first (like basic math errors in Office 07 before SP1).
4. Stop overcharging home and student users for versions of Office that actually are useful (including Access and Publisher)
5. Stop making changes for the sake of making changes.
6. Provide real support for 64 bit apps. Its absurd to have to install 32 bit office on a 64 bit machine, for instance. Or not really being able to use IE64.
7. It shouldn't cost me a small fortune to upgrade to W7 Pro from Home Premium.
8. Provide 16 bit emulation on 64 bit OS's like W7 Home Premium.
9. Stop constantly breaking piles of software every time you upgrade Windows.
10. People are finally getting comfortable with W7. Stop pushing W8.

Forgot to mention in my previous comment; BSOD's should be trappable and preventable by now. So some driver hiccups. Catch the error, reset the driver, put out an error message that actually makes some sense.

Office 2010 is IMHO causing more damage. "Outlook has stopped working . . . " 1,710,000 hits and counting. MS personnel are defensive about this. $285 to fix it, for lots of customers. Microsoft needs to stop letting the retail customers be the Beta testers. These issues should have been worked out pre-release.
PS: I'm NOT talking about the Beta version. I had Microsoft on the phone with one user for 7 hours. Everything on the computer worked fine except for Outlook. 7 HOURS? How bad does the product have to be when the manufacturer can't fix an interminable crash for 7 hours. It reminds me of Public Folders. And, I hate the 'Ribbon' interface. So far, none of my 400+ users have given a positive response to it. At least with the menu version, you could eventually find something. The Ribbon may keep you looking for days.

Great thread. If only MS would read, understand and put in to coding policy they might make a difference to their customers and by virtue of that their bank!

They've been jumping up and down and screaming about it for years, and then the ones that decide they really want to go places in the organisation shut up and start making like bubbles in soda; up rapidly, with some floating on top and most (that are any good) leaving, under their own power or otherwise.

You want to change Microsoft? Get Steve, the Board and most of the folks above Level 65 in the company into a cabin somewhere, clear everybody else a suitable distance away, and then nuke that cabin from orbit. The next morning, the share prices will spike by at least 50%.

As a long term customer of Windows since 3.1, I've used many copies of Windows, on many computers. But, I've always resented that I had to pay $ 100 and up for each version of Windows. Manufacturers pay a fraction of what I pay. If I want to upgrade my computer, it is usually too expensive to buy the latest level. An example, I'm using a laptop with Vista, and want Windows 7, but refuse to pay the price! I think, I should be able to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 for much less than $100.

In Asian countries where piracy is rampant... they sell Windows a fraction of the cost of even so-called "Student versions"... The OS, maybe about 1/3 of the price for home premium, if not less. If they can afford to sell it that cheap to them, why not everyone else?

@ DaemonSlayer
Even in other areas their claims about software piracy prevention and the flawed tactics used are sumned up well by "olemicro" posted above.
"Software piracy: Microsoft - why would I want to steal any of your products, when I can get better stuff for free?"

LOL!

If you compare prices in $ that maybe, but if you compare in terms of how many hours an average worker has to work to pay for the product I think you will find that the reverse is true.

Bill's vision was to put a PC on every desk and in every house. That meant two things, one was definitely lowering the cost, the other was generating a perceived need.

I am not knocking the above by the way. The productivity gain for business in terms of using IT, was used up 20 years ago. Now it's an unfortunate necessity like a workforce, place of business, regsistering the company, having a lawyer and such, so the game is to perpertuate the necessity.

Bill Gates was, and probably still is, a computer geek. He had a vision of providing an easy-to-use OS for the 286's of the day. It was tough going at first, with wildly mixed response among both computer pros and potential users. Gates persevered and came out with a GUI that was easy to use for most, but at the expense of flexibility for non-DOS users. There were legitimate complaints about stability and security. New versions increased speed, further reducing user control and demanding more machine resources. Drivers are now dependent on MS approval, new peripherals need be bought with each new Windows version. Windows-specific programs are becoming the norm, Internet Explorer woven into the fabric of the GUI so tightly that MS claims nothing will work without it, an attempt to solidify their building monopoly. The boardroom is becoming more and more the driving force behind Microsoft's growing bottom-line orientation, no more interested in the useability of their (now) OS than that pleasure of their customers. Concerns about pirated software, hacked code, customers getting more use from a Windows release than figured by the budgetmeisters. That's considered a great financial loss to MS. Theft, even.
When now-huge corporations like Microsoft goes picking on individuals for loading on one more copy of Win 7 that the license allows in their home network. Oh, yeah-home network. They don't like it. Marketing must think that the home networker is getting by with something that is cutting into revenue.
DEATH TO THE USER! (No, this doesn't sound like Bill and Melinda.)

We switched our office over, typical small office, no surprises. Mild learning curve in Open Office. Applications server went to our host with no fuss.

We have had practically 0 real expenses in IT, with the only ones being from a failed laptop that was out of warranty and a lightning strike took out a monitor. In terms of productivity and efficiency, there was a boost that over the first year more than made up for the mild learning curve.

We kept the IT budget and staffing the same and assigned them to in house and client projects which created a positive return for every dollar we spent on the department. Between our clever CEO and converting to Linux, we had a powerful return on investment, not just a lower cost of ownership.

Donate half of all Windows 8 profits to MAKE POVERTY HISTORY. Windows itself generates under 20% of MS revenue. The problem with Linux is that there is no money in it. Microsoft needs to show that big money can do big things that benefit the world. Bill Gates has made a good start. It should become part of the company philosophy. Bosch has given nearly $1 billion to charities. To whom much is given, much is required.

This is the key to it all. Microsoft and Apple should be doing this, but they are not. Bill Gates doesn't count, since he is retired and uses his own fortune to make things happen (kudos Bill!). Linux should be doing the same, but the funds need to come from all the users who saved a ton of money.

LINUX USERS: As a challenge, donate at least half of what your company or personal software or OS would have cost as a Microsoft product to a charity of your choice. If you cannot do so financially, donate time or reduced rate services to your local charities or schools to match the above figure.

GNU/Linux users are notoriouosly the cheapest people known to mankind. GIVE their money to a charity that doesn't know how to debug a C program in their momma's basement? Please.

Like a wise men once said: the skunk is not a bad animal, the problem is that the smell gives it bad advertising.
That said, MS has been a platform for part of the IT evolution, but like any organism was born, grow and will die. Not because it???s OS, it will happen cause like any other organism in this world, it evolution is not as fast as the surrounds that keep it alive. So the decay and the effort to keep up with that changing environment will eventually take its toll. We saw it with Pan am, 3com, Lehman brothers and so on. Of course we have examples like IBM, but they trade their soul as a corporation for a new design. In other words IBM from 1970 it is not the same like IBM 2011, only the name remains.
So to that you add the bad RP, the smell of death reeks as time goes by. Like the poor skunk.

I have read many evauations of MS product in the couple of years that were less than factual and then at least a quarter of the review marveling at how Apple does it better even when they dont't have a competing product. It is like watching the Apple ads, twisting the truth to make Apple look good. Many of Microsoft's products are superior to their competition case in point WP7's UI is superior to iOS and Android but it is never mentioned in phone reviews, no the only thing reviewers can do is to say Microsoft is abandonning it phone OS, which of course is a patent lie a la Apple advertising. I remember when PCMag was started for IBM compatable PC's, Apple had its own sister magazine called MacWorld and TechRepublic originally only dealt with PC's that ran MS software or Linux. Now we see more coverage for Apple's overpriced offerings. Apple only looks good if you refuse to see its deficiencies and there are many and for the same reason Microsoft used to be slammed, its a proprietory OS but in Apples case so are the applications that run on it. Reviewers are still telling users that Apple's OS doesn't need AV software, though we all know that is not true anymore except in the mind of Steve Jobs.

So my point is if Microsoft started receiving fair press coverage of its products, their products would fare much better. I have tried several flavors of Linux and it is still an OS for techies, Apples hardware is stylish but the OS is still deficient for the business desk because of a lack of economical software, Linux and Microsoft run openly on any brand of computer and neither is really in the hardware business.

Face it: Rather than admit they paid 2x+ for a product (ex: Laptop + OS) that essentially does the exact same thing as a Wintel laptop, OF COURSE the Apple user or evaluator is going to at least attempt to sing its praises. No one is going to stand on the rooftop and yell "I got snookered and I liked it!"

I used to work two levels under the CIO at a Fortune Fifty company in the States. My direct boss, responsible for all internal support and provisioning, was a statistics junkie; if it could be measured, tracked, evaluated, he had numbers for it going back close enough to forever as makes no difference. We had quite a few Macs courtesy of a company that had been M&Ad two years before I came into the picture. During those two years, the new people had fought tooth and nail to hang onto their Macs, with what turned out to be good reason. After two years of tracking, the numbers showed that the median Mac user in the organisation was 74% more productive overall than the median Windows usee. Our median Windows support tech worked nearly sixty hours a week; our Mac support people were contractually limited to 37-1/2 hours per week, and had not so much as requested an hour of overtime since long before the merger...while supporting roughly six times as many users per tech. My boss' eventual brainstorm was to get CIO and Board authorisation to start charging differential support costs. "You want a bunch of new Windows PCs for this new group you're building out. Fine; here's what it's going to cost you in budget dollars. Your alternatives are to hang on our HPUX systems (which nobody wanted) or to use Macs." User manager: "I thought Macs were super-expensive. Why are you charging a fifth as much for support?" Us: "Because it costs us a whole lot less to support them." The parent org, which had been largely Mac-free outside of the advertising and media departments, started taking on Macs, which quickly became dead-finger tech for the new users. You can run your IT shop with religion, or you can run it with reality. I personally prefer reality, and that's why I'm typing this on a Mac. And oh, by the way, I do know Windows; I've been developing for it from 1.0 beta on up through Windows 7.

... HP-UX v. MAC? Give it a break.

Given MS's basic business model was to remove any competition, and the press couldn't be successful with a never ending stream of MS is great articles, what did you expect?

"Apple, it costs more and it's not as good so buy it because MS are too good for us."

Not seeing that as a goer myself...

Oh and I'm not an Apple fan by the way

Oh and MS not in the hardware game, you see any one selling a PC that windows won't run on, or a devices that can't. Plenty of ones that did or will though aren't there?

Try and get out more...

-- but only if it wants to change, and as far as I can see, Microsoft doesn't see any need to change anything it does or the way that it does them.

In my experience, Windows 7 Professional (64-bit) has not been a "killer product". You cite sales figures as the proof of success, but people have not been buying it because they think it is a "killer product", just the next one which might, some day (we hope) be at least incrementally "better".

For a start, it installed both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of the Microsoft software, then proceeded to run the 32-bit compilations as if the CPU is 32-bit, and it still does that regardless of what I do. MS tech support cannot tell me why and referred me to Tech Net -- where posts are removed from the forum and never answered or acknowledged except by sneers, insults, bad jokes, and snide remarks from the "sysinternals" insiders. I cannot even read the posts to which they refer.

Suffice it to say that I have encountered numerous problems installing and using Windows 7, aside from the user-hostile differences in the UI introduced since Windows XP. Obtaining "support" is a time-consuming chore, and everything is tagged with a long and meaningless "case number" which makes actually identifying one's report of a problem difficult, when the subject line of the original report would be much better -- whether the Case Number makes it easier for Microsoft to identify and track them.

That is Problem One: Microsoft does what it does for its own benefit and convenience without any evident consideration of the customer or end-user of its products. Microsoft is governed by internal agendas and politics, not by external realities, which a monopolist always believes that they can ignore.

Then it becomes clear that the employees are just running out the 60-day "free tech support" clock so that they can start charging $60+ /hour, which makes obtaining any further "support" financially infeasible for everyone whose income is less than that of Warren Buffet or Bill Gates. So those who have unresolved problems just go away, and Microsoft doesn't care whether they are satisfied.

Most of the tech-support responders cannot read or write English well enough to do their job very well, so understanding what they are asking me or what they want me to do became a special challenge all of its own.

Make no mistake about it, if the alternatives weren't worse, then I would have nothing to do with Microsoft. It is a monopoly that acts like a monopoly and will retain its monopoly unless and until someone creates a more user-friendly operating system. So Problem Two is that with every new product, every new attempt to diversify, Microsoft continues to act like a monopolist.

With a self-inflicted One-Two punch like that, any company would fail. It is only a matter of time before Microsoft fails entirely.

As you point out carping against Vista was mostly unfounded frenzy. The base OS had to be changed, if only to get past the 4GB barrier, and they chose to make it the ideal platform for corporate client machines. The vast majority of initial problems were third-party apps that STILL weren't ready. MS had all the important bugs fixed and deployed within a couple of weeks, and went the extra mile to get the 3rd parties running. I've been through every Windows launch since 2.1, and Vista was definately the best to that time. Do we remember the fuss over XP?

So why the all the uproar? I'm convinced that the REAL mistake was releasing Office 2007 at the same time. That much UI change all at once leaves users confounded over which button to push next, and more shock than they had seen since their first encounter with Windows. Vista was the new boy, so it got the blame.

At its heart I think Microsoft knows its future is in the Enterprise. With Windows, WinServer, and Office, MS reigns supreme, past and present, and just keeps getting better. The consumer products may be embarassing, but that's just an annoyance that Microsoft can ignore.

P.S. If you watch their history, Microsoft has always been a technology follower. They wait 'til the dust settles, and come out with the product that cleans up. We should know better than to buy release 1, or even 2, of anything MS. I think MS and Nokia are just waiting in the tall grass to knock off RIM, and push Apple back to the brilliant but poor innovator.

If wants to recover here is what it needs to do:
1. End the practice of validation. If I buy a copy of windows let me use it on one than one system. Have reasonable limit like three to five systems.
2. Slash the price to a reasonable 30 bucks. Why do you think Windows is pirated so much? Cost. It is way overpriced.
3. Fire the W8 planning team. We don't need a new OS every few years. Just improve the current one. (Sorry, MS can't force the Big Brother OS on us if they do that.)
4. Maintain support for older OS's like XP. The damn thing works and is still in use.
5. Give me greater control of my computer. Let me decide which start menu, control panel, file system, and GUI I want. Don't shove the changes down my throat like the stupid ribbon in Word 2007. Hate it and set up shortcuts toolbar to resemble older versions. Stop making changes in the appearance of menus just for the sake of change. For example changing the desktop background. Why do I have to run to the control panel. XP lets you right click and then properties. Much easier. Quit hiding files, instructions, and common shortcuts where it takes Daniel Boone to track them down.

Most of Microsoft's bad reputation comes from clueless users who probably shouldn't be sitting in front of a keyboard to begin with. If something goes wrong while they are working in an app it Microsoft's fault. MS has the name so they get blamed for everything. Part of it comes from the Linux and Mac users. They think because a small minority of them are using something that it is the best, even though they are limited in what they can do with them. Once again, clueless.

Is MS perfect, uhh, no. They are not. They have had more than their share of problems. But Linux, Apple, GM, Ford, and all the people reading this are not perfect. A lot of the complaints are just whining from people that have nothing better to do and the media falls into that group by posting headlines like yours. MS's biggest problem is FUD from the clueless.

For Windows Mobile, the opportunity is to deliver a more robust service than Blackberry and provide a mechanism to allow seamless migration of RIM infrastructure.

MS should have solved the completely annoying and performance-degrading situation with anti-virus methods. An optional approach for running the browser in a sandbox should have been pursued. No other industry would tolerate the massive degradation of resources that is inflicted upon Windows users. This was amplified by the lag in IOS and Linux malware. MS has the clout to move the Browser industry to a more effective implementation.

It sure would be nice to know what exactly is going on behind the scenes when the system is dragging or unresponsive.

Don???t change the user interface except at great peril. Be observant of the marketing failures of BMW and Ford in relocating the control features of their vehicles.

Be extremely sensitive to the corporate desktop IT support challenges and considerations. They have a no-thanks job and are exceptionally hesitant to accept the risk of migrating to a new version that includes gratuitous changes which could affect user productivity.

It is surprising that the article did not mention the ridiculous situation with MS Software Assurance value absence.

Microsoft???s strength stemmed from it???s cultivation of developers and the fact that IT Support staff were personally invested in training/experience to maintain lucrative compensation. It would be worthwhile ???gaming??? the hypothetical scenario of bug-free software and the consequences upon IT Support staff. ???If it didn???t break, what would I do????

The fact that MS and IBM (VM powerhouse) allowed VMware to seize the virtual machine environment was an unforgiveable strategic error on the part of their management teams.

The amount of investment that MS makes in its OS environment as always been trivial when compared with the revenue. Sheer greed has placed them where they are.

MS has been displaced in the tablet market due to its focus upon the higher margin software-only domain. If MS had seriously cared about the total user experience of the platform, it would have had vastly more success in driving that market. For instance, MS should have delivered an incredibly friendly remote control capability for mobile tablets controlling conventional desktops.

Finally, Ballmer should have been held directly accountable (terminated) for the dismal stock performance.

The first thing that happens when the OS can't handle a new task/command is for the little circle to start spinning, and then the accursed "not responding" label appears. DUH! We all knew that even BEFORE we invoked the command. But then the obvious--the total inability of the MS operating system, be it VISTA or Win 7, to handle a task without fuss or bother--turns to the riciculous, which is to blame someone else.
Blaming others has been the tactic of MS for YEARS!! The sheer arrogance of the MS organization to always look outside its own incompetence and to pin the problem on someone else is the real issue. Until they can start realizing that they no longer have any credibility for competent software engineering or manufacturing, they will continue their downslide into oblivion.

I think the first thing they need to do is stop charging such high prices for their software. This will not only draw in the croud of people that are not able to afford their products and would make the people who already buy the products happier as they are saving money. They are making enough money in the gaming market on RRoD and making people buy a 2nd and even 3rd xbox. The price to get something fixed is not worth it as its the cost of buying it new. Its not like they replace the entire system or upgrade it for you they just fix that 1 part and send it back. I have enough broken xboxes to last me a life time, and I am still using my generation 1 ps3.

2nd they need something new and not just sit around with heads up their asses waiting for something to come dropping out of the sky to be the next new big hit. They then would spend months researching to then drop the idea.

3rd They need to be able to support their products. When you call MS you get someone from India who is reading a guide off of a website on the steps to take (while in the process of charing you $150 for the support call). These people don't know what they are doing and the best thing they can do is format the HD and reinstall windows. People are not looking to start over, but keep what they have. I used a SA call because I could not get around the Elevated and protected admin status. The guy told me to run cmd as administrator and that would solve my issue. Then ended my call and I raised hell about it. These people you talk to on the phone are not interested in MS products and are not interested in what the consumer whats.

If you cater to the consumer your bound to build a better reputation by making them happy. When you get a complaint deal with it to make the cusomter happy don't expect that 1 complaint is not enough to work an issue, because word of mouth goes a long way especially when that 1 person is IT and then passes on to buy an Apple as they have much better support. MS also likes to just sweep things under the rug and say play dumb. You can only hide so much **** under the rug before it becomes noticable.

Besides them fixing their support for their products and dropping prices the only other things I could say would be to end MS and start over. By removing MS from the market not only would MS know how useful it was, but it will give them time to listen to the people who keep them in business. But I highly doubt MS even looks at their reputation or spends half the time reading peoples ideas than trying to think what they will be eating for dinner that night.

I started life using a keypunch machine and submitting stacks of cards to an attendent at the computer center to be run at 3:00 AM in batch jobs. It was hours before I would know if a job ran successfully. If it didn't, I would have to debug it, re-submit and hope that it ran the second time - again, at 3:00 AM the next day. I knew of kids that ran jobs over and over for days. It made everyone a better programmer. You would go through your stack of cards, one-by-one, to make sure your logic (and your coded formlas) worked the first time! Later, stacks of cards turned into boxes. You also learned to color-code your "modules" so you could re-assemble the box you dropped... That usually happened only once so color-coding was really unnecessary. The only GUI we had back then was the "doodles" we made on the first draft of the flowchart - all hand-drawn simply because we didn't have CAD programs (per se) or Visio.

We next graduated to running programs in a shared mode. It was absolutly amazing! The card-reader was on one end of the room and the printer was on the other end. Sometimes, short jobs would be printing out by the time one could walk from one end of the room to the other...

I became so proficient writing programs in FORTRAN, I was able to write a reasonably easy-to-use word processor and a very limited spreadsheet program. JCL, Assembly language, COBOL, PL1, RPG: stuff no one hears about anymore was what we knew.

Several years later, personal computers were being advertised in Popular Electronics and a few other magazines. IMSAI, MITS, MOS all had early "personal computers." None of them had a monitor. I personally had a MOS KIM-1: a hexidecimal keypad and a hex LED display. I thought this was much better than having to read a "row" of LEDs and mentally "convert" 4 bit binary nibbles into a hexidecimal result...

If I remember correctly, Bill Gates was busy around this time writing a disk operating system. I seem to remember that IBM either wanted to buy the operating system or hire Gates or something... It's too easy to look this up on the internet but I'm too lazy - you can do that. My memory is not what it used to be but I think I'm getting this fairly close to being true. Regardless, Bill Gates and Paul Allen were busy writing a programming language (BASIC) and a version of DOS to be later known as MS-DOS or Microsoft DOS. MS-DOS was the biggest thing since sliced bread.

Silly me... I bought a Heathkit H89 with TWO (count 'em...) (2) hard sectored, 160Kb floppy disk drives. It boasted TWO (count 'em...) - (2) Z80 microprocessors! Unfortunately, I chose to buy the CPM operating system rather than HDOS. I had a whopping 48K of memory (...couldn't afford the full 64K) and the system ran at 2 MHz! I also got a copy of "Benton Harbor BASIC." That's when I really wrote a "good" word processor and spreadsheet program. My next mistake was to buy a Tandy 2000! It had a 80186 (versus a measly 8088!) Seriously, as I was leaving the store with over $3,000 worth of computer, monitor & software, the store manager said, "You know, Tandy is no longer going to support the 2000. They're putting all their resources into the 1000." I should have turned around right then and asked for my check back but I didn't. This machine ran at 8 MHz - I didn't want to give it back... It came with a proprietary version of MS-DOS - not like the IBM PC used... I also found that I could write only a few programs that were compatible with IBM's or clones...

At work, I got the very first IBM XT in the division with a CGA "color" minitor. I used a drafting program that I don't remember the name of right now (I finally remembered the name!!!: Symgraph...) and could display drawings in 8 colors! Over the next couple of years we acquired a couple of IBM AT's that ran significantly faster than my "old" XT. I was jealous...

We also bought a couple of copies of AutoCAD - way better than my old drafting program... All this was MS-DOS based. Things stayed this way for a couple more years and one of the engineers got a copy of something called "Windows." Actually, I think it was Windows 2.0 or 2.1. No one wanted to take a "chance" by purchasing the "first edition." A few years earlier, the same engineer had bought a Sony Betamax video recorder for a little over $1000...

By then, we had a acquired a couple of EGA monitors. Man, this "Windows" thing was something. You could click on an icon to run a program... no more C:\Programs\Estimate.exe ... - saved a lot of time - maybe even 3 or 4 seconds! The bad thing was, Windows was like a DOS shell. It was a "program" that ran other "programs" and essentially slowed everything down.

Nobody liked it until Windows 3.1 came out. Companies started writing applications that would run under Windows and more & more people were using it. I still resisted. I had a 12MHz turbo AT (clone) that I put together myself. I could outrun the pants off of someone running Windows on a "store-bought" machine!

Windows 95, 98, 98SE were overtaking the world. How did this happen? Face it: Bill Gates & his buddies made life simpler. MS Word & MS Excel became the "standard." More & more companies were writing applications that would run under Windows. Life was good. At the same time, Microsoft was making the whole world semi-"dependent" on them. No Windows? - sorry this application won't run in DOS mode...

I kept hearing about Windows 2000, eventually bought a copy and it turned out to be a bit more "stable." I used it for a couple of years and bought a copy of "XP." I like XP a lot better. I very rarely had to re-boot but some applications would hang up and stop responding but essentially, the operating system was fairly solid. I think (but I may be wrong) that XP is the first operating system from Microsoft to do away with the dependency on DOS. All-in-all, XP is a good "platform."

My wife bought a computer with "Vista" on it. I hate it. I feel like I'm in the middle of Brazil. I don't know much Spanish and no Portugese at all! Once you invest the time to "learn" an operating system and feel comfortable with it, you don't want anyone messing with it. I don't care if it has "security issues" or not. If you're going to write applications, what happened to the responsibility of the programmer(s) to ensure security for their own database? Hackers are what they are - one step below as**oles.

I no longer write applications (well, sorta' don't) - too lazy, I guess. Plus, there are a gazillion programmers out there that have more patience than I do. I'm now simply a "user."

I put together a pretty good computer the other day. Supermicro motherboard with two Intel Xeon CPU's running at 3.0 GHz with a 750 Gb hard drive and 4 Gb memory. $59.00 + shipping - ebay! (I already had the hard drive...) I recently bought a copy of Windows 7 but decided to install a copy of Windows XP that I purchased about a year ago. I had it installed on my home computer which had a catastrophic hard disk failure - unable to bring it back from the dead. When I installed it on the new 750 Gb drive, it told me that I had 30 days left for activation. No problem, I thought. I remember that I had to do that when I first installed in on my home computer. Well, it turned out to be a significant problem. I couldn't get Microsoft to accept my activation key. I phoned and got an automated answer that required me to punch in numbers on a phone and it turned out to be a giant pain before it was all done.

Then, I hated Microsoft for putting me through a frustrating ordeal. That was unnecessary. I bought the product - I should be able to use it - no questions asked. When I buy a loaf of bread, I take it home & eat it - no questions asked...

My Wife has Windows 7 on her work computer. I don't hate it as much as I do Vista - but it's different enough from XP so it only makes me hate it a little less than Vista. On this computer, she also has MS Office 2010. I hate all the applications included in this package. They made it so a "user" spends most of his (or her) time "hunting" for the function that was easy to find in 2003 - rather than getting any work done. I'm glad I still have a copy of 2003 and plan on using it until Microsoft sees the error of their ways and gets rid of the "ribbon" and puts the menu bar and toolbars back like they were.

I have the greatest respect for the success of Microsoft. I have no respect for a company that tells their customers, "I don't care if you like this or not. I've got you by the balls!"

How does Microsoft "clean up it image?" Simple - listen to your customers.

I too started out with punching my own cards and learning to tolerate the long turn around times between submitting and receiving results from the batch process. I have not worked in the field during all those intervening years as you have, but I've been a user and done some programming from time to time. Your recounting of the progress the industry has made was a good read and it exposes a big part of the problem. After years of ever increasing capabilities and utility we have seen a leveling off and even a kind of regression in the software. We still see improvements in the hardware, but at a time when we should expect the human experience with the interface to have become friendlier instead we are treated to changes which frustrate and confound.

Microsoft needs to rethink the way they do business or expect to see market share erode. I don't know if they have the corporate culture to change or not. I hope they can turn it around because I would hate to see their place taken by some outfit in mainland China.

Many companies go through good times and bad. As said earlier, people have long memories and take things personally when something goes wrong. Microsoft has got many things right and a few wrong but it is the bad that sticks. Most of the solutions cited above are mostly wish lists about the products, not about reputation; we all have wish lists. (I'll state mine at the end)
Several have said that they should listen to their customers, if you think that they are not spending large sums of money surveying their customers, having user panels and studying usability then you are mistaken. You have perhaps found things about the products that you don't like, that is different. On pricing issues, the problem is that many people compare the price of software rather than the cost. Cost has to include training, support, usability/productivity, information interchange and many other things. Try giving Linux to an average user with Open Office or Libre and tell them to install it and learn it, in a small business, large corporate or home environment and you will get a blank look and not a lot of productivity out of that user.

To answer the question asked I will put only a few points:
1. Be quicker at admitting that something is wrong, then you will have more time to fix it rather than fire fighting.
2. Be slower at releasing product between RC1 and RTM, get a wider real world feedback.
3. Continue being tough with driver validation to remove the major cause of failures. Also Insist on clearer identification of drivers so that error messages can be more meaningful when a failure is caused by a driver. (stick the blame where it belongs, perhaps in your driver testing department)

What would be on my wish list:
1. A leaner OS with an advanced install that allowed the average installer (not geek) to leave out all the bits that were not needed.
2. Incremental add-ons to OSs and Applications rather like the motor industry's "Optional Extras" to keep the basic price down.
3. Always put all previous version data converters on the retail media. Also put them together on the support website, and explain why you changed formats.
4. Improve the support website. Particularly the search within results.
5. Keep coming out with great products like W7 and Office 2010

anymore than any other vendor in the mass market space. Mass market, at saturation point requires obsolescence. Office 2010 has new features, some of which we might have asked for because every body already hasd Office 2008, so without a 'new' product they were going to suffer a drastic business downturn.

1) Admitting they were wrong would open them up to all sorts of problems, far cheaper if we or him or them were at fault.
2) Being slower at releasing would put MS manager's jobs at risk, reduce revenue, and allow competion a march.
3) Driver validation, really! Who's going to pay for that?

1) Leaner OS, No backwards compatibility...
2) Incremental add-ons. Add ons would get smaller, and cost more to do. Windows is a monolithic architecture, changing that would be ruin for them
3) Always put previous data converters, reduces argument to buy the new version that reads the next totally unnecessary proprietry format that some fool just sent you some stuff in.

Might as well wish for wins on the wars on drugs poverty and terror, all of which are big business....

On reputation:
1. After 40 odd years in business I have always found that far less time is wasted by admitting fault early. It immediately gets the customer/press on your side instead of starting a non-constructive battle that you cannot win because if you cannot persuade a customer in the first minute why you are not at fault then you probably loose the customer.
2. Short term gains from releasing a product early are nearly always followed by longer term losses on a product and loss of customer confidence. e.g. Vista
3. Driver validation is currently paid for by the hardware vendor if they want WHQL certification, it costs $1000 a time.

On Wish list:
1. Why does Leaner OS equal "No backwards compatibility"?
2. I do not believe that any OS architecture is monolithic. Windows has never been. In W7, for instance, it is clearly easy to have optional add-on to go from "Basic" to "Home Premium" to "Business" to "Ultimate". I do not see any reason why other elements might be optional such as networking. Of course most users would want to include it even in the "Basic" version and it would probably not be a option in any of the other versions. Perhaps even leaving out the GUI in one version to aim at embedded solutions.
3. The reverse is obviously true, as if it was easy to convert from old formats then you would not be concerned about updating to a newer version. All the data converters are available they just do not always make them easy to find.

You seem to have this strange long term approach.....

Windows monolithicism exhibits it self in strange ways.
For intance to install SQL Server you had to have to have File And Printer sharing installed and enabled....
Monolithic design is one code base, not one deliverable....

What are you going to chop out to make it leaner, given the monolithic design...
As far as I can make not even MS have the dependencies documented.

Monolithicism is not specific to MS, falling into that architecture is Chapter One of how to get into technical debt. Very few software providers bother with chapter two, how to pay it off.
Leaving out the GUI is a near waste of time, graphics are in the Kernel, which is why you want them to be a bit more sensitve about drivers....

…of an old joke comparing Microsoft with another operating-system company. "(Company X) makes software to be used. Microsoft makes software to be sold , usually by the boxcar load." Turn that around, and I will once again be their most loyal fan.

When releasing a new version of Windows, that is for the most part, a 'fixed' version of the current operating system, DO NOT charge for it. It should be illegal.
Owners of Windows ME should have had a free upgrade, and so should have owners of Windows Vista.
Kudos to step seven part two.
The certified professionals are the ones who are your best PR. MS makes them jump through hoops to get Certified, and rightly so. But then MS does all they can to make money off of them.
I rarely recommend MS for much any more and this is one reason.

After 12 years of Microsoft I am now using Ubuntu. Love Ubuntu and will not go back to Microsoft. If Microsoft had left XP alone I would have not gone anywhere else, but was really cheesed of with Vista. Cost me a bundle for a load of .....!
Thank goodness for Ubuntu.