Wow this is an unbelievable read. It describes the Vista project at MS from the point of view of a single developer trying to implement the Vista shutdown menu. He says that there were weekly meeting of 20+ to pass judgment on what he was doing/supposed to do, plus another 20 managers in the decision tree. It took him a year to do 200 lines of code and it still wasn't complete when he left. I would chalk this up one disgruntled guy, but there were other MSers, even a manager commenting that they had similar experiences. If it really this bad throughout the company, I would say that MS is not long for this world, unless they do a massive overhaul quickly. Probably firing 90% of the managers would be a good start, and I don't mean that as hyperbole.