I tried not to judge mining the harbor on ethical grounds. One the one hand, I'm not pleased that there are people with those kinds of ethics in a company I'm an investor in. On the other hand, I don't think you can rationally keep all such people out of the business environment, and finding someone to punish for allowing them to flourish as they may have at a company the size of MSFT is a daunting task.
Note that I'm not implying Gates is actually fostering this as a policy, but that there are surely individuals within an organization of that size that can, and do, take risks with respect to succeeding and then further risks in maintaining their positions.
Like many relatively "new" companies, there are a large number of people with VERY lucrative stock holdings; I can see where the kind of wealth and the potential for that kind of wealth will lead some individuals to act in their own best interests, along with the interests of everyone else in the company.
In short, if your fortune is at risk, mine the harbor.
The question about how this is a benefit to the customer needs to be looked at in the eyes of the beholder; if you're MSFT, you have the market arrogance to imply that it is good for the customer to stay with MSFT products - almost exclusively. If you're the customer, you probably don't know what you're missing, and if you do, like I do, I'm forced to live with buggy things for a while until the vendor tackles the "problem" or I find another app.
Enough ranting on my part - I get headaches dealing with this conundrum of consumer/user/investor!!
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