I was interested in your article on the lack of intuitiveness in Microsoft products. This has long irked me, although I think the problem is that a lot of products - not just Microsoft's - lack a clear ‘model’ of what the software is for. 

There seems to be no evidence of anyone having thought about the objects being manipulated by an application and the actions that users will want to perform on them.

Examples are particularly evident in Outlook. I'm constantly frustrated by quirks such as not being able to highlight two or more messages in the message list and save their attachments. Also, I can right-click an attachment icon and change the display between a large icon, small icon and list. Why can’t I set this option for all messages? Again in Outlook, I can’t edit a new message and simultaneously switch back to a received message window and browse through it.

I appreciate that I am still using Outlook 2000, and that I may be not using the most up-to-date version of everything. But I'll be damned if I am going to spend a small fortune to exchange one set of idiosyncrasies with another, and I am reluctant to upgrade anything until I see some sign that the products have been actually designed rather than just cobbled together from ropey old chunks of code that happen to be lying around already.