MS hasn't ever been good at ...
making finished and usable products. Ever. (Some retrospective analysis follows)
Windows 3.0 was (considering the time) actually quite good in that respect. Then we have 95, ME and Vista on the other end of the scale. Any company with smaller stash of cash would have gone to bankrupt with any of those. But monopoly can afford anything: They just rise the price of products. Just like MS has been doing .... But Apple is becoming very near, pricewise. That means competition and MS can't stand that, they lose. Currently market share, later whole company: If they sell cheaper, they lose profits and if they sell higher, they lose market share, which is same as profits for a monopoly. A monopoly need a lot of cash to keep that: Bought politicians, for first. Criminals always buys politicians first, it's the most profitable move you can do.
This (VL site) is just the newest example of an idea (bought elsewhere) and shoddy implementation of idea. You can see same in Office 2007 or Windows 7: Some good ideas but nobody is interested at usability or overall quality: Those don't make money (and that's the second goal of MS, keeping monopoly is the first), because those people making the decisions have their secretary using the product, not themselves.
It's always easy to buy cheap crap to _other people to use_. Nobody would buy less than adequate product for daily use unless there isn't an option to use something else. See what happens to Apple's market share and you'll see what I mean. If you can choose (money, policy,applications) from Vista or OS X, the choice is clear. 7 is just re-dressed Vista, all of the DRM is still in there. Anybody who understands what that means, won't touch it even with a 6 yards long stick.
Especially when there's a ton of marketing eye candy , like in ... windows7. Or XP. Or Vista. Or Office 2007. Or actually anything made after NT3.51. "All chrome, no go" would a racer say about those. And he would be absolutely right: 90% of CPU-power and memory is used for pretty pictures, ie. nothing usable. (Pictures themselves are often good idea, that's not the point.)
Also it's "normal" that nothing works like it should or works about a couple of days. Or that a PC machine lasts three years and then motherboard dies. Lowest common denominator (in quality) is nowadays the only available level. (Unless you buy Sun- or Apple -hardware.)
MS hasn't been able to compete either whenever there's competition unless you can compete just with huge amount of money (meaning XBox). Their core bussiness is a monopoly and they are actively using monopoly-generated money for expansion and unfair competition, a practice prohibited by law but since DOJ was ordered to stop investigations (by Bush Sr.), judging those obviously has been left to EU.
It's not doing good job either, monopoly is kept by keeping hardware manufactures in tight leash: "If you sell other than MS-products, we won't sell you ours (or the price is 10-fold)" and nobody have had guts to prohibit that, even when it's obviously illegal monopoly abuse in US and in EU. Money can buy you protection, even from the state prosecutor, obviously.