My brush with the dark side

Attention all MS Field personnel: Anyone who would like to come over to my office and slap me around, I will be available between 2:00 and 4:00...

I spent the first four years of my career here at Microsoft as part of Microsoft Consulting Services in NYC. One of my biggest pet peeves was that, when you interacted with the product teams, their answer for everything seemed to be

"Well, upgrade to <place-product-name-here> and everything will be better."

When customers come to you with issues, they clearly don't want to be up sold, they want their problem solved (duh).

Unfortunately, just a year after moving to Redmond, I almost found myself committing that same atrocity today. We have a customer who makes heavy use of xslt, and all the xslt work is eating up allot of cycles, and they asked us for some advice. Now, we have put a HUGE amount of work into increasing the performance of Whidbey, and you can see the results of that work in the product, so my first thought was 'Well, if you want to increase perf, why not move from your current engine to Whidbey?'

At this point I could hear Emperor Palpatine's voice in my head going 'Yes... Feel the upgrading flow through you. Come to the dark side...' I do think that there are benefits to upgrading here, especially for perf, but I was clearly focused on my product a little bit more then I was on the customer. So I wanted to offer an official apology to all my friends and peers in the field. I shall not be tempted again...