Remember, just because Microsoft can do something, doesn't mean you can. Microsoft makes their own gravity. Normal rules don't apply to them.

Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.

Talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Don't pay any attention to the competition. They're not relevant to you.

Indeed one of the best ways to deflect attacks is to make it look like they're succeeding. It's the software equivalent of playing dead.

I've been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system - it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes.

We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor.

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.