Narcissistic Microsoft Productivity Enhancements: Are you More Productive???

I'm not sure if Microsoft Sales staff is serious when they say their products make people more productive. From my experience lately there is absolutely nothing from Microsoft that makes me more productive. In fact, in abstracting the layers further away from me, I'm becoming increasingly less productive with each iteration of Microsoft technology.

The following productivity enhancement claims from Microsoft have actually made me far less productive. At times up to 90% less productive:

• Microsoft Office 2007 (Access, Word, Outlook all suck, Visio and Excel are the only apps that are considerably better).
• Microsoft Windows Vista - don't even want to start on this one. All I wanted to do was change the default font size.
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services: how can it take 1 day to setup an import data routine? How is it possible to build such a beautiful diagnosic display with such contextually irrelevant error reports?

I decided to check my NetVibes.com start page and did a search for Microsoft and Productivity (I tried variations like productiv etc. to get the most results).

The image at right includes some of the biggest technology blogs and yields no results.

I decided to look a bit deeper into the rabit hole and did a Google Search for Microsoft Productivity. The first thing I noticed was that every result on the first page was to a Microsoft site.

So I decided to do a Yahoo Search for Microsoft Productivity same thing except it contains links to Microsoft Applications that once again claim to make you more productive.

So I decided to do a Windows Live Search for Microsoft Productivity and guess what, there are actually links to 3rd party sites for Microsoft Productivity.

Is Microsoft living in a bubble with respect to measuring productivity? I've lost at least 2 months this year to learning curves in updated Microsoft Tool Kits. I'll never get those 2 months back ever - and it was at the expense of Microsoft Clients that I learned this stuff.

What do you think? With each incremental product release, are you becoming that much more productive? Or are you just like me, frustrated, and looking for other options?

Please let me know your opinion.

Over and Out