Joel recently posted a critique of Vista's shutdown menu, declaring that more choices are a bad thing. This was a surprizing observation given that the new Vista design brings the two overwhelmingly popular shutdown items -- sleep and machine lock -- to featured interface buttons, while hiding less used functionality in a pop-out menu.

Ignoring the seeming contradiction of Joel's analysis, shortly thereafter a former MSer posted about implementing that specific feature, detailing all of the bureaucratic bunglings that led to the eventual implementation. A widely quoted point was that at times up to two dozen people worked on this particular feature.

Is that really all that surprizing? We are, of course, talking about a critical UI element of the flagship of a $300 billion dollar company. In particular about one of the most communicated and referenced features of an operating system that will see installation on hundreds of millions (possibly over a billion) PCs.

Is it really that extraordinary that a large number of people were involved? I'd be surprized if it were any other way.

Joel embraced this response, holding it as evidence that the company has lost its way, becoming the bloated monstrosity that takes 5 years to create Vista. He certainly isn't the first to fondly recall the days when Microsoft was great -- Mini-Microsoft, an anonymous personality calling for the return to the days of old for some time (most notably calling for a significant head count reduction to reduce the bloat) has been leading the charge, along with a loud chorus of supporters.

Are we talking about the same Microsoft? The Microsoft that brought out the travesty that was Windows Me? The Microsoft that had an absolutely atrocious legacy of slow to market, insecure, bug-ridden, ripped off products? The Microsoft that went close to a decade with negligible changes in the Office suite?

I marvel that people can seriously reminisce about the good ol' days of Microsoft with a straight face.

While there is no doubt that Vista was a product timeline disaster -- though I would imagine it has far more to do with technological overreach and unfounded optimism than bureaucracy overload -- Microsoft has been releasing some very solid, feature-rich, secure applications with pretty good regularity.

IIS 6. .NET 2.0. Windows 2003 R2. Visual Studio 2005. Analysis Services. Reporting Server.

These are extraordinary products, overwhelmingly eclipsing their offerings from the late 90s in every way.

If I had a choice between the Microsoft of yesteryear and the Microsoft of today, I think the choice is pretty clear.