Implicit in Microsoft's approach is the belief that customers are simply too stupid to know what they want and that it is Microsoft's job to teach them why and how they should use Microsoft's overly complex and therefore unreliable programs.

This is no joke. It's a serious problem and not easily fixed. It begins right at the top of the company, with Ballmer himself. I hate to play armchair analyst but Ballmer's roots -- a Detroit kid growing up with a dad who was a Ford manager -- are too significant to ignore. Remember Detroit in the 1970s, when customers started saying they wanted smaller, cheaper, leaner, simpler cars? Toyota and Honda listened, while the Big Three kept cranking out monstrously huge cars and then putting all sorts of effort (advertising, discounts on the lot, dealer incentives, blackballing dealers who tried to open Toyota or Honda stores, spouting empty patriotic rhetoric about buying American, blah blah) thinking that by doing this they could get customers to buy the cars that they'd already told Detroit they didn't want. This -- not Harvard, not Stanford -- was where Ballmer's worldview was formed. There at Detroit Country Day School with the other kids whose dads ran the Big Three in the last days of Detroit's golden era. Now at Microsoft we're seeing a repeat of this phenomenon.