I worked in the Windows group, by the way. Even if we had wanted to know, it would have been impossible to categorically state that x% of the product needed a rewrite. It just didn’t get developed that way. Nor have I ever seen any software engineering organization deliver stats like that.

In every large company I’ve ever worked with, my customers were exceeedingly well informed, often knowing ahead of me what other divisions of my own company were up to. And it makes sense. The key customers had multiple points of contact and sources of information. It wasn’t always perfectly accurate, but it was often better than that which my own company communicated to me. After all, they tell their customers what they need to know about their products, while the they may not pass that information along to other people in other divisions of their own company.

And then those customers pass that information around their own companies, where it may lose some of the facts, leading to comments like “60% of Vista is being rewritten”, as opposed to a possible 60% of the code has issues that need to be resolved.

I’d assume that Acer is a key Vista customer after all. You used to work for Microsoft didn’t you? Are you saying that you knew more than Microsoft’s key customers about every aspect of Microsoft’s products?