Who owns a product: Customers or vendors?

I find this post by Jeff Nolan fascinating, and right. Right, but I don’t know what to do with it.

Microsoft designed Outlook/Exchange for email. It was never intended to be a file system. However, that is how many people use it, and they’re experiencing Outlook at its sluggish worst as a result.

Question: Whose fault is this?

Here’s the quote, and Jeff’s take:

“Outlook wasn’t designed to be a file dump, it was meant to be a communications tool…There is that fine line, but we don’t necessarily want to optimize the software for people that store their e-mail in the same .PST file for ten years.”

The quote is from the Outlook Program Manager following the recent release of a fix that promises to resolve the Outlook 2007 performance issues. She is wrong. Period.

Jeff suggests that Microsoft needs to support its products as people actually use them, and not as they’re necessarily conceived, developed, and marketed. I get that argument. Let’s face it: it’s a problem worth having. Microsoft makes scads of money in part because people use its products. A lot. In the right way and in the wrong way.

But is it right to lay responsibility for supporting a product in ways that are, potentially, orthogonal (I hate that word, by the way) to the vendor’s interests and resources? Microsoft increasingly wants its users to store their enterprise data in Sharepoint, and has built Sharepoint (as well as its file system) for that purpose. Why should it support Exchange/Outlook as a replacement for these products?

Open source doesn’t necessarily manage this “problem” much better, though I suppose with the freedom to fork comes the freedom to enable others to capture alternative value in a product. This is the kind of fork that I like.

The kind that sees, say, Hyperic deciding its systems management technology should be used for systems management – the business for which it raised venture money. Now let’s say that Hyperic expressly does not want to get into the business of using its technology to manage home security networks (if, in fact, the technology could be used for this – I’m just theorizing here), but more and more people are discovering that it does this well. I suspect Javier and crew would be glad to see their technology put to good use that they have no wish to personally advance and support.

Again, I think I disagree with Jeff: a company should not be held to support use of its software that is neither optimal nor intentional (from its perspective). But in the open source world, it would not have to, as the code is free for the forking, if under an OSI-approved license.

On a slightly related note, why doesn’t Microsoft want to support this use and tweak Outlook/Exchange to support this? I can’t think of anything better than having an email program I’d developed serving as the information hub for people and enterprises. But maybe that’s just me.