Best of the blogs: Product feature lists are a fine balance straddling both effort and return, explains Sean McCown. For instance, should a vendor -- be that Microsoft of any other -- allocate 3 months and 10 developers to create a feature that 500 people are requesting, or invest those resources into a feature 5 experts are asking for? "From what I can tell, Microsoft at least tries to do things right. They pull in customers and run them through the product and give them a set of tasks to perform. They then write the GUI based off of these results," McCown explains in My talk with Microsoft. "My big question now is since the GUI isn't living up to what it should be, is the test flawed, or is the general DBA population filled with idiots?"

Careers: If you happen to be seeking advice on becoming more assertive, Bob Lewis recommends an alternative. "Assertiveness is simply another name for effective negotiation," Lewis writes in Advice Line. "So no matter what the conflict entails, your starting point is to recognize what you want from it and to recognize that it's perfectly okay for you to want it." That's just the beginning.

Operating systems: It's now been a month since Windows Vista became available to enterprise users, but analysts are saying there's been no rush to adopt it. The new OS is already plagued by bugs, application compatibility, and other peripheral issues -- even to the extent that one industry experts suggests "Microsoft never intended anybody to run Vista before January."

Posted by Tom Sullivan on December 28, 2006 05:18 AM