Dear Dale,

I agree with you that something is wrong with The Giants; however, I'm not sure I agree that 'incompetence' is a correct summary.

In the same way, I often feel that some particular thing that M$ does is utterly stupid - and yet I know very well that Bill Gates must be a truly brilliant person. Also, the people whom I personally have known who have gone to work for him are among the smartest people I ever knew. (One was a former intern of mine an the other was a fellow student in my master's program who has since retired a millionaire. I knew her husband better than I knew her, but in a very few conversations I came to the obvious conclusion that she was brilliant.)

Incompetence could be the root problem, as could stupidity. I don't completely write them off - and yet it just doesn't jibe for me.

I have other ideas that for the most part are not as emotionally fulfilling as the conclusion that Bill is an idiot.

1. They are so big and so focused on growth and money, they don't actually have to stop and think about the customer. I saw the same thing happen to SGI. In the beginning they would fall all over themselves trying to help customers, but once they got successful, their phone service became unbearable.
2. They are arrogant. The philosophy of Windows, e.g., is incredibly rude and condescending.
3. They ARE handling their big customers - the medium to huge corporations who buy 500 to 50000 machines at a pop.
4. Operating Systems are just incredibly complex - too complex to manage. That doesn't entirely explain why windows resource management sucks, but it's still true that OSes are among the most complicated things that humans have constructed. We put so much crap in them and so many features - and something's bound to go wrong.

I do not have recent experience with Macs. It's been 17 years since I was a regular user and my understanding is that they have radically changed their underlying OS to some flavor of Unix. This was probably a very good move. Still, it's possible that some of these root problems that I think exist for M$ likewise exist for Apple.