Dare Obasanjo examines the "why don't you support X" problem:

Microsoft is the only company I've worked for us a full time employee which means that sometimes I wonder how different my perspective of inter-office interaction is from that of the average software developer with a wider range of experiences. For example, one thing I've noticed about internal mailing lists is that there are always people who seem to assume that they are smarter and more knowledgeable about a product or technology than the people who actually work on the product. You can tell these people by the way they point out obvious features that are missing in the product and berate the team for not having them

It's no different here, and I doubt it's much different anywhere else. From the outside, any given feature always looks "simple". For instance: I get asked about VisualWorks fonts all the time. Believe me, if it was something simple, we would have done it already. We have a cross platform product, and many of the frameworks date back to a time that predates Windows, Mac, and X11. Which means that making those frameworks work and play well with what's gone on in the wide world isn't always simple.

Even without that particular issue, any vendor trying to solve a problem always has the following problems:

• The tyranny of the existing codebase
• The need to maintain some level of backwards compatibility

Customers always want improvements, but - at the same time - they want all their old stuff to keep working. There's an obvious tension between those poles, and product management (in this case, me), is always trying to navigate that tension as best as it can.