Vista's Many Turnoffs

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Along with Lettvin's team of eight, there were two other teams involved in the shut-down feature, says Lettvin. That's not counting what Lettvin calls the additional management layers between the developers. In total, as many as 43 people worked on the feature. "Twenty-four of them were connected sorta closely to the code, and of those twenty four there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked," wrote Lettvin. "Somewhere in those other 19 was somebody who did have final say but who that was I have no idea since when I left the team—after a year—there was still no decision about exactly how this feature would work."

In an e-mail to BusinessWeek.com, Lettvin stressed that he didn't intend for his post to receive such a wide audience and that Google had nothing to do with his venting. "I didn't wish to offend my former colleagues or any Microsofties at all, for that matter," he wrote. "I described a very specific scenario that is emphatically not applicable at all to Vista as a whole." In fact, Lettvin thinks Vista is "gonna be pretty amazing."

Spolsky, however, can't resist using Microsoft as the punch line of his ongoing jokes. In a Nov. 24 post, titled "how many Microsofties does it take to implement the Off menu?," Spolsky argues that a bloated organizational structure with too many engineers working on small problems likely contributed to Vista delays and unnecessarily complex designs. "It is very hard when you are the engineer, and a feature is your life, to accept that nobody else cares," says Spolsky.

Versatile Power Usage

Still, Microsoft's main barrier to simplicity may be that somebody always cares. The company is, after all, designing a system employed by the majority of computer users around the world. The company undoubtedly has some customers who prefer one shut-off feature over another. In fact, more tech-savvy consumers may want to choose "hibernate" over "sleep," rather than wait for the computer to gradually figure out that they are not coming back and burn battery power in the process.

IT professionals may be particularly sensitive to shut-off issues that can reflect their company's culture and bottom line. Some, conceivably, may want to program the computers to always "hibernate" to ensure power is never wasted and their companies save money. Others may want to keep the computers from hibernating so that employees rarely have to spend time "waking up" their devices.

In a sense, Microsoft's operating system has to be all things to all people—at least, all PC people. Perhaps then it isn't excessive to have nine ways to say goodbye. After all, there could have been more.

Holahan is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York.