Compare that to the shuttle design where lives are on the line and the software has to just work. The microsoft spec approach is really to just ``wing it''
In the space shuttle, almost every bug could kill an entire crew. For Microsoft, a bug may cause a desktop to crash. Arguably, Microsoft wastes the most potential because many millions of instances of Microsoft software repeatedly waste a few minutes of people's lives.
The difference is that Microsoft is able to externalise almost all risk and accountability. The same principles of "defect management" are applied to aerospace hardware and Microsoft software. The only difference is the acceptable threshold for bugs. For the space shuttle, bugs are minimised until the budget is exhausted. For Microsoft, bugs are minimised until it costs less to to say "Oh, heck. Just ship it."
The marginal cost of selling software is $.00 pretty much. So MSFT operates on a what-the-market-can-bear approach, not a costco-style mark-up-everything-10-percent appraoch.
You are implying there is some relation between the price of Windows and the amount of work that goes into it. Given the size of their war chest, one could argue that they already charge much more than their software costs to produce.
