Sharron is in her forties and lives in the South of the UK; not too far away from places such as Stonehenge, Avebury, and the local lunatic asylum. Sharron is a computer builder, geekette, and a blogger. Having just eradicated a plate of salmon sandwiches by consumption, adding another couple of pounds to her weight in the process, she told us in her dulcet tones, although somewhat scathingly, that she is delighted with Microsoft’s new approach to customer relations:-

“Following on from the massive fiasco of Vista; where Microsoft took absolutely no notice whatsoever of the requirements of its customers, this comes as somewhat of an anticlimax.”

“Microsoft have, until recently, gained a reputation for always knowing what’s best for its customers; despite what its customers actually want. This came to a head with Vista where Microsoft secretly put together what they considered to be a winning formula for an operating system without consulting anyone whatsoever. – Not even the hardware manufacturers.”

“When Vista launched they said “Surprise surprise; here’s our new operating system that requires ten times the resources of the last one just to produce a blank screen, and also requires hardware that isn’t yet in production, other than for a number of special computers on which it’s preinstalled – made only by Microsoft’s top partner companies…” ”

“As you can imagine; that didn’t go down that well and it had people thinking they were trying to monopolise further. – Yet when their shiny new operating system proved to be worse than the last one; so much so in fact that the softies had to rush out a service pack as fast as they could to make it work properly, combined with the fact that older computers were unable to run it without a significant upgrade, people started turning to alternatives such as Linux and Mac.”

“Microsoft had no choice but to change their tactics and start listening to their customers, as it was by now clear that they, Microsoft, weren’t able to come up with a new product that their customers thought was the bees knees; nor one that competitors envied either: In fact, competitors laughed at it as the software giant’s customers bought those competitors’ products in preference to Microsoft’s.”

“Out of necessity, then, the softies have gone overboard on public consultation this time around; and what they’ve produced appears to have been pretty impressive in most people’s view. The RC at least appears to be what the customers are looking for. The RTM version? – Well it’ll be tweaked further, and should by all accounts be better yet. Whatever it turns out like; surely nothing can be much worse than Vista was?”