I have been reading much these days about reform at Microsoft, both technology and management-wise on all these different blog sites like mini msft. I have taken an analytic stance while reading a lot of these posts; not because I don't think they concern me, but mostly because I understand most of these perspectives and I am rarely shocked by any of them.

While doing this it struck me that perhaps it's time for me to do my own research ... a very basic one at that. I am going to ask random people I approach in everyday life "Name me one thing you really hate about any Microsoft OS". After the first 3 people asked me what an "OS" was I felt like these people must be from Mars or something and that I should perhaps ask a different sort of people.

But it came quite quickly to me that my sample was not flawed and that any attempt to change my sample was going to skew the results. After, the first three tries, it took me about a week to start asking again. So I rephrased my question the next time around to "Name me one thing you really hate about any Microsoft product".

I have asked this question to 63 people in 6weeks so far (yes I don't get out as often as I would like to), and to my surprise only 16 people named one thing, almost everyone else named more than one!! 7 people either brushed off my question with an "I don't care" look or didn't seem to notice me at all. Maybe they thought I was trying to sell them something :) Even more surprising, the 16 people that named only one item seemed to be on the more knowledgable side of technology (yeah I know this a'int exactly analytical ... but after being in the tech industry for 6+ years, my gut instinct has rarley failed me).

Frankly, this was baffling in itself ... but it does not end here. More than half said that MSN search "sucked" and that Google was so much better. The funny thing is that I didn't really have MSN search on my mind when I was talking about Microsoft products. Anyways, I humored these folks and asked them if they had tried something besides google and MSN search. Most answered "NO" instantaneously, however 3 of them asked me "What do you mean?".

The first one to ask me this was a clerk at a Seven Eleven ... and frankly he left me stumbling for words. "Have you tried using something like dogpile or AltaVista or anything like that?" I asked. "Never heard of them." said the clerk; the exact same response I got from the other two who asked me what I meant.

At least 30 people also told me that "Windows slows down my machine after running for a while" or variants thereof. 12 mentioned "Word doesn't do what I ask it do" or variants thereof.

The bottom line here is that I didn't hear IE or Vista or Visual Studio or things that most of these blogs seem to critically analyze even once. Not any in my sample seemed forward-looking. And yeah ... I live in Redmond, WA, so expected a lot of techies. I have tried to stay true to my sampling, but maybe I have unintentionally not approached anyone I thought would work for Microsoft. I am not going to attempt any explanation of the data, just present the data. I have some guesses, but I am sure I would keep second-guessing myself till I forget my own name.

So what do you folks think? Got any more questions for me to ask around? This would be a great way to build up my annoyance factor I guess. So if my career at Msft doesn't work out too well ... I could try selling insurance or vacuum cleaners to the aged :)