SNIP>
>I think that you have to approach the whole issue, as the customer, is to have expectations that the company is making a good faith effort to get a reasonably reliable tool in your hands....and that they will ultimately be responsive to critical issues that affect your ability to use that tool.
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>What you don't want to do is to hold MS (or any other toolmaker) up to a standard where QA expectations stifle innovation.
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>VS 2005 is a good product. It's eminently usable now and will be improved over time.
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SNIP
That Spanish word looks excrementally close to the French word "merde".

I'm afraid I can't buy your top statement above, and I suspect the problem lies in their definition of "good faith".
"Good faith" has to be applied to the end-user's perspective, not Microsoft's.

I look at the last 3 months or so of "critical patches" and can only be disgusted by the whole thing. The simple fact that one of them broke LAN-accessed Help surely was known to them but THEY LET USERS FIND OUT FOR THEMSELVES!!!! That's no way to run a business! And the following patches have been worse by all accounts!
Those efforts may look like "good faith" within MS, but they are simple merde to users.

I do agree with you that MS has an insurmountable problem in testing all of its wares across all permutations and combinations of supported software/hardware. But lowering the definition of "good faith" is NOT THE ANSWER.
In a very different world IBM faced this same problem 25 years ago and they had only thousands of installations, only 3 or 4 supported operating systems and exactly 13 supported add-on packages that could be purchased in any combination. Their solution at the time was to limit the add-ons to 4 specific combinations. That was around the time I left the mainframe world but I believe it worked well for them.
Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to be banking on developing software that can "test" the myriad of permutations. A fine goal and maybe realizable, but UNTIL THAT IS ACHIEVED they have to do a far far better job than what they show now. Their current methods only show disdain for their CUSTOMERS. Customer do tire of such antics, and faster than anyone might guess.

cheers