<<I used to get daily irritated with MS until I just learned to think of every version of their OS as being alpha, even though I payed for the software.>>

And this seems to have been built in to their marketing/development strategy of XP, going through Win2k; as also seems very much to have been the case with Apple's development of OSX through the current version. Economics may dictate these board room decisions, but the expense to the consumer can be annoying, and I'm sure there is a good amount of hand wringing done about how much the consumer can be made to pay these development costs. Or so I surmise.