James Fallows Survives the Belly of the Beast

In the February, 2000 issue of the The Atlantic Monthly, Fallows tells about his six months as a consultant on Microsoft Word's development team. A few interesting quotes:

There is even a person who created the "It looks like you're writing a letter" auto-annoyance feature in Word. I had to sign a separate confidentiality clause promising not to name him.

Good thing. I'd have to hunt him down and kill him.

Certain aspects of Microsoft culture reminded me of Japan. The company is self-contained and thinks of itself as separate from the rest of the industry. It cares about market share above all else.

One other discovery helped me understand why the company has remained so profitable and dominant. Microsoft understands exactly who its most important customers are. Unfortunately, that group does not include people like me.

...Product planning, therefore, is focused with admirable clarity on those whose decisions really matter to Microsoft -- the information-technology manager at Chevron or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example -- rather than some writer with an idea about how to make his colleagues happier with a program.

And that, my friends, is the problem with Microsoft: they're only interested in the corporate customer. And since they dominate the industry, there's no one to sell to me, the individual consumer. That's an opportunity for open-source software.