> My problem is this: M$ doesn't even bother *trying* to produce 
> high-quality software.

Do you have any evidence at all for that statement, or are you still making 
things up as you go along?

Read through this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_Vista

You can read through the development of XP too if you like, the link is at 
the bottom.

That certainly doesn't sound to me like a company that isn't even bothering 
to try and produce high quality software.  They released Vista beta almost 
18 months before it went on the shelves, and continuously made changes based 
on feedback.  Tell me, what would you do differently given that you are 
bashing MS so much over their design methods?  Spend 3 years in the beta 
phase?  Gee, the Finance Director of MS is going to love you...

> Yeah, that's true. I mean, it's not like OpenOffice Writer is anything 
> like Microsoft Word.

True, MS Word is a very profitable product.

> Except that they're not interested in how to make a better product.

Of course they are, otherwise nobody would buy the next version of Windows 
and they would go bankrupt.  Note that what you consider "better" is not 
necessarily the same as what everyone else in the world would consider 
"better", MS has to cater for a huge number of very different people, and 
they need to make the most number of people want to buy it.  This doesn't 
necessarily mean that you or I will find it "better" personally, but it is 
the best thing for MS to do.

> They're interested in how to screw the customer out of more money for the 
> least possible effort.

Err, yeh, that's the goal of *all* companies.  If you start making decisions 
against maximising profit (eg spending another 2 years testing software 
rather than releasing) you are likely to get fired and replaced by the 
shareholders.  Live with it, it's how business works in the real world.

> As if that wasn't bad enough, then they try to claim that they're these 
> visionary leaders of innovation and technical advancement, when they can't 
> even produce a word processor that works properly - something that existed 
> decades ago...

Yeh I guess that's why nearly everyone I know, as well as switching from IE 
to FF, also switched from MS Word to OpenOffice Writer... not.

I think it's just you that can't get Word to work, even my mum can use it 
fine :-)

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