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If Microsoft truly developed products for its business customers, which pay for Chairman Bill Gates to be the world's second richest person, priorities would be more in line with customers' needs.

Priorities are askew. In watching Microsoft for more than a decade, I've observed the company's priorities to be consistently out of alignment with its business customers.

Some of its priorities, as revealed from observation, enterprise interviews and analyst surveys:

* True Interoperability: Seamless applications operations across all platforms. Strangely, the bigger complaints I hear are about how poorly Microsoft stuff works together rather than with other software developers' stuff. Microsoft-to-Microsoft interoperability problems typically occur across versions, such as Windows 2000 and Office 2003 or Office 2003 and Office 97. In my personal testing, WordPerfect X3 offers cleaning format translation with Office 97 or 2000 than Office 2003 (I haven't tested against Office 2007 yet). While Microsoft-to-Microsoft interoperability is important, many larger companies do want Microsoft software to better work with other stuff, too.

* Simpler Everything: Easier software installation, maintenance and management across applications and platforms. IT managers expect some complexity across different developers' platforms, but complexity across Microsoft products—particularly with the company so quick to emphasize benefits of cross-product feature integration—is perplexing.

* Longer Lifecycle Support: Many customers want to put software in place and run it for as long as possible. This meets their interoperability goals. Putting something in place and leaving it is good TCO (total cost of ownership) practice. The old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," is a motto for many IT organizations.

Customers don't really see these priorities met by Microsoft, which hasn't done enough over that last 10-to-15 years to reduce product complexity. I single out complexity, because I see it as root cause to the Microsoft-to-Microsoft interoperability problems. Interoperability between Microsoft and other developers' stuff is a whole other topic (worth its own post!). Longer software support is more about revenue: Microsoft makes money when companies upgrade to newer software.

How and what Microsoft delivers to customers reveals that the first customer is someone else—actually, it's two someone else's, one lesser than the other.

The lesser customer is Microsoft, and I see the focus there as really unintentional. Microsoft runs its own software and always the newest stuff. Microsoft will even shift major operations—what the company refers to as "eating our own dog food"—to beta software. Example: Microsoft.com is powered by Windows Server 2008 Beta 3.

Microsoft is the customer that runs its software first and in a way that is highly atypical of its business customers. Just a tiny percentage of businesses shift totally to the newest Microsoft software—and on almost every computer—as soon as it's released. Microsoft's network infrastructure runs Microsoft's newest software in a mostly homogenous fashion. Most enterprises—and many midsize businesses—run a heterogeneous mix of Microsoft software and Microsoft and other developer stuff. It's a huge disconnect. Microsoft's practice means that its computing infrastructure looks unlike most of its business customers most of the time.