My friend Ted Krueger wrote a blogpost yesterday about Microsoft isn’t the devil.
And I wasn’t going to reply to much because I think these are useless debates anyway. He has his opinion and I have mine, and I don’t want him to agree with me.

And of course Microsoft can’t be a devil since they don’t really exist. They are a company. A company is run by people. People that work for the shareholders. The shareholders invest in a company to get a return on their money. And they want that return to be as high as possible.

So we have to understand that everything they do is driven by that premise, make profit.

You as an enterprise customer, also work on the same premise. You as a person also work on the same premise, because you want to spend the least possible.

And now we have a conflict of interest. They want to spend as little time as possible fixing bugs that only few people are effected by and you want that bug fixed because it loses you money.

The problem here is that Microsoft is a big company and they get to choose their battles. Not you. While it is your money they took. They have the luxury to say No, sue us. You don’t have that luxury, you either work around or spend more money on another product or be left frustrated.

Of course this goes for most industries. When you buy a new car you expect it to work without flaws and if not you want the manufacturer to fix it at his costs. But what is a manufacturing fault and what not, who decides? The courts? Maybe as a last resort. First of all you come to a compromise with the garage you bought the car from, because it is them that give the warranty (here in Europe anyway) and they then go to the manufacturer to reclaim that money.

Have you ever gone back to the shop to complain about a bug in Windows 7? Why do we find it reasonable that the manufacturer of software can say that they made something by design? Is it worth the battle to get a bug fixed? Do you have a choice?

Have I ever submitted a bug to connect? No. Have I ever submitted bugs to other software companies? Yes. Why did I not file bugs for Microsoft products and prefer the workarounds? Because I would rather ad value for my company than waste my time fighting the system.

It’s all a mater of ROI and filing a bug at Mirosoft does not give me the ROI I need.

And those are my ramblings of the day.

And I won’t comment on the MVP thing (which means I just did ;-)).

You can just ignore this post and go back to sleep now.