I just returned from the Office Developers Conference in Redmond. As I have gotten a better feel for the internal structure of MS, I see more layers of responsibility than I would have ever guessed. On the one-hand, I'm surprised that they do as good a job as they do within the organizationally deep and matrixed environment they have. On the other-hand, while they are delivering quite a bit of function with Office 12, I strongly suspect the time it takes to integrate a single line of code into a release (a measurement I created years ago at IBM) has become a significant % of the total development cycle. For example, if they were to be completely honest in acounting for their activities and time, they might discover that the average developer has only 3 months out of 12 to actually write code.Why do I say this? Well, from experience I can gage the effectiveness of a software development organization. Web technology products are more open source than W32 apps and if you take a careful look at the 2003 applications, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see what it took to build these apps/platforms. I don't think the 9 months of overhead number is too far from reality and if it's at all close, it's obvious then why they are having some morale and productivity issues.