Microsoft 2009

Ever since the departure of Bill Gates from the helm of Microsoft, the company has changed its business model, and not for the better.

It used to be that their new product introductions made you want to upgrade for flashy new screens and features, but nowadays they mirror the auto industry with the rapid release of new models and versions, while the older products are being retired quickly which forces upgrades that only serve to increase MS revenues.

The new products lack the backward-compatibility of the old, and in some cases even alienate the users. Case in point - Office 2007 changed the entire user interface, making veteran Office users hunt in frustration for their familiar commands & features. Even the default file format is new, so in order to share files with older versions you have to Save As the older format. And developers cannot simply click, drag & drop to create custom toolbars, now they have to write XML code to modify the ribbon.

Another example of their disconnect with users is SQL Server 2008 - Notification Services, which was introduced in SQL Server 2005, was removed from the new version. If you've utilized SSNS now you're stuck.

Still another example is Windows Vista, which basically requires a brand-new PC to run effectively. Upgrading from an older OS to Vista in most cases disappoints. And will your old programs & peripherals continue to run with Vista? Oftentimes they won't.

Next on the horizon is the Azure cloud-computing initiative, where companies will trust their corporate assets to the Internet cloud and a set of MS-managed data centers. This, from a company that has a regular release schedule of security patches along with numerous out-of-band updates as well. Those patches run the gamut, from Windows 2000 and IE6 all the way up to Vista and Windows 2008 Server.

No software is perfect; Linux, OpenOffice and Firefox have their own sets of quirks and limitations; but the expectations are much higher for the #1 software company in the world.