Microsoft has lost a ridiculous amount of money as a result of my having these problems, even after missing their launch date repeatedly. They have great vectors for supporting their many users, but had I been paying $65 for each of the phone calls (or even incidents) I made to Microsoft, I would have thrown up my hands a long time ago and migrated to Ubuntu (Linux distribution).

But figuring out specifically what you'll get even getting from Microsoft requires careful monitoring remains a challenge, even a few months before (and it turns out, many months after) release. That 'home entertainment hub' notion that Xbox promised is still waiting for Sony's grab with the PS3, if they get their act together - there's still time.

But the costs to a company like Microsoft of providing this support, in both customer good will, and hard dollars, can really add up. Say Microsoft makes $50 per copy of windows (I was able to purchase my upgrade copy through a student discount of only $80), and say their infrastructure costs and costs per hour of support are about the same $50/hour on average (I suspect this is a quite conservative estimate, even with their considerable outsourcing). Everyone is entitled to two support calls within the first 90 days, with their copy of windows (remember the days of unlimited free support? - not anymore!). I am sure that their expectation is that only a fraction of people actually call in, and that they can resolve problems on average in 10 minutes or so. However, when you have a persistent customer, with a difficult, chronic problem, that ends up on line for 40 hours or so (my estimate), sometimes with multiple people, and often with 2nd-level support (which obviously would be more expensive), suddenly such cases can cost a company a lot of money. This is

Who has traveled this road before?

From an end-user's perspective, measures like mean time between failures and mean down time are not meaningful - they indicate what occurs in the aggregate. What matters is how frequently things break for me, and long is it until the missing capability that I expected to have works again? In this environment, there really isn't any substitute for knowledge, experience, and insight, but unfortunately, this isn't always available.

Just yesterday, I had a problem with the Xbox / WMC combination in which playing one playlist on the Xbox side hung my desktop machine.  When you looked at the playlist contents on Xbox, they were different than they were on my desktop machine, as the Xbox versioin contained duplicate copies of several songs that weren't on my desktop, and the desktop machine hung when the Xbox attempted to play those songs. How did those get that way? Who knows! I just know that opening the playlist, and saving it again without change (but forcing a new file creation date) caused the problem to clear up. I solved that one on my own, though was tempted to call in to Microsoft to see how long it would be before someone suggested my workaround.

As of this writing, I still don't have what I need. Unlike many others with my configuration, I'm able to connect. The problems I'm having now are more pervasive, because I'm able to play media, but at some point after that - sometimes minutes, and sometimes hours - my system hangs. There are no events listed in the event log, just a freeze. I suspect the drivers for my card - many other users are complianing about the quality fo these drivers - but have no hard evidence. I'm now in the place where the many players will just point fingers at each other, even though there are good tools in place. This is the cost of quality - in components and systems - that we all suffer. My only real courses of action as a user is to complain to those I buy these products from, consider other alternative devices, get involved in beta testing, and wait until upgrades or the next generation product is available in the hope that some of them will address my problems. I'm certainly not alone among frustrated Vista users. All of this just continues the inevitable trend of users migrating to Ubuntu, which has already begun.

One thing is certain - if your product is successful, you have to figure this stuff out quickly, or you will be overwhelmed with problems, which is why having a competent troubleshooting team is so important. Microsoft's forecasts of user adoption rates demonstrate what this risk looks like for them! Of course, rumors are now floating around that the next service pack may contain new Windows Media Features. So my journey continues, until I finally learn that stability is more important than functionality.