This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Scoble and MS - clue free Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Build better products. That's a tougher one cause building products takes a long time and the time between customer's problems and the day when they get fixed is an extremely long time. For instance, what happens now when an application crashes? It asks you if you'd like to report the problem to Microsoft. There are teams who are trying to learn from that data and fix the problems. Due to data we've learned from those we're rebuilding the driver architecture, for instance. That's a major freaking deal. But, you won't see the results for several more years. So, it's going to take something like six to eight years from the beginning of collecting that data until the day when you really see huge changes in our products. That's too long. It makes everyone think we're not really listening.

Here's a cluestick - you could have fixed a whole ton of this very easily:

• You could have shipped XP with the Firewall enabled instead of turned off. Do you have any idea how many people have been hosed off as a result?
• You could have shipped Outlook and Outlook Express with all the scripting defaults turned off years ago. People are still being hosed off because of this
• You could have shipped one of the XP service packs (or heck, even the original) with the various dangerous ports closed. Instead, you shipped with them open

How frelling hard is it to figure out why you aren't trusted? Those aren't fixes that would take years - those are fixes that most corporate customers apply in the pre-installs they do. People are torqued because you don't fix the simple stuff. instead, you blather on (and on and on) about how nifty Longhorn will be. How about you fix the truly stupid security issues with the next fix you ship? Then maybe, just maybe, the public will have a smidgeon more respect for you.