I Love Microsoft Software

There...I said it. I love Microsoft software.

Living in the software industry as I do, I just have grown to respect how they've solved all the secondary requirements that go into building software. I'm not talking about the core software solutions here. I'm talking about all the other software requirements that, while at regular software shops are afterthoughts that are frequently cut from a schedule, are never forgotten and consistently completed with a high degree of quality. And those are the requirements that so often impact the user's experiences and opinions about software.

Requirements like:

Usability
Too many times developers without any training in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and without a basic understanding of usability paradigms are left to their own devices to develop the screens that people use.

Help
Thanks to Microsoft, the F1 key is now synonymous with getting help, so much so that other software vendors are forced to use F1 as their help as well.

Installation
Maybe its just me, but installing Microsoft products tend to be some of the easiest products to install.

Backwards Compatibility
I have no real proof on this one - its just a gut feel. I do however get a warm cozy feeling inside when I have no problems opening my Excel 97 spreadsheet into Excel 2003.

So before somebody tries to convince you that installing a software product using apt-get that has its UI written in Swing on some abstract Linux distro is the wave of the future, give them an install CD for Microsoft Word. They'll be typing their first Word doc in minutes.