The issues surrounding Microsoft software, and why it (from a user perspective) so often lacks quality are important to Microsoft's future.
I hope at some future date to get time to try to tease through some of the issues which impact on this.
Meantime, have a look at this post, Microsoft: improve Windows Media Player , to get an impression of what a product which, presumably, has gone through all Microsoft's internal quality checks feels like to the end user. The description of how Windows Media Player fails disgracefully is worthy of careful thought. If a product fails, which may be inevitable, then denying in those very circumstances the user access to the tools to fix the problem is how, in my terms, software fails disgracefully.
If Windows Media Player passed Microsoft's internal quality checks then, it seems to me, that Microsoft' internal quality checks need careful scrutiny, analysis and improvement.
Microsoft's quality processes need, in my view, to become much more customer-centric.
Measuring what those processes currently measure may well be necessary but, to improve the user experience, those processes are certainly not sufficient.
Posted by Andrew Watt at March 19, 2004 12:02 PM