MS probably doesn't even know. I recall reading that there were 6 different versions of the Service Pack update for Office 2000 depending on where you got them from, and they weren't all compatible with each other. Do you think after another decade of Monkey Boy and his winning business strategy of pitting all the departments against each other that they've improved? Nardella actually seems like a grown-up, but he's still a dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft exec.... less stupid certainly, but just as evil.

One of the biggest problems with Microsoft is that they are too big and disorganized. They have no vision, and no guiding principle, other than maintaining the lingering shreds of their monopoly. This is obvious from looking at the designed-by-committee, piecemeal UI for Windows, which is getting worse every release and not better. The best you can hope for for any particular feature from release to release is that it's just arbitrarily different and not broken or hidden or completely removed.

Windows clearly peaked with XP, but their UI peaked with Windows 2000. The only reason 7 is liked is because they backed off most of the bad things they did with Vista, and the only thing, the _only_ thing I think is better in Windows 8 than any previous version is Task Manager, which is not something I use often. But it is nice.

My #1 wish for Windows post-7 is that I could just use the "Classic" theme, but apparently Windows is now too sophisticated to do what it could do 15 years ago. Their UX department has gone totally off the rails or maybe was taken over by wild monkeys. Microsoft used to be _the_ place for good UI design back in the 90s. They were very scientific about it, and their designs were very well-thought out, based on CUA, and an absurd amount of user-testing and most of all, consistent. Not perfect, but they were very good. But as soon as graphics cards could do more than 256 colors and Photoshop was invented, everyone went wild and UI became the lawless, Wild West funhouse it remains today. Except in the past few years, everyone decided that the "flat look" is cool (news flash: it's ugly and hard to make out) and now we have UIs that are as usable and good-looking as Windows 2, but without the consistency.

I'd thought Microsoft had run out of sharks to jump with Windows 8, but they keep finding more. But here's the thing. I still like Windows. I just wish I could make Windows look at work like it did when it looked and worked well (I'm not referring to the underlying technology, which is presumably improving all the time, although I still think Windows 8 is absurdly slow compared to 7 and much worse compared to XP... and I have empirical evidence. I do a lot of work in a Windows 2003 VM running on VirtualBox (long story) and it's much faster than the Windows 7 host and doesn't suffer from the, oh gee, everything's going to go "Not Responding" for 30 seconds to 2 minutes for no apparent reason that I see with the apps (at least MS apps) on the host.