Why microsoft products ?
After nearly half a decade of working on Microsoft platform i have just switched to a non microsoft software for data integration, the product is considered to be a leader in the segment but in the past couple of weeks have just realized why the development cost are so low in the MS platform.
1) There are enough news groups about the product im working on
2) the site of the company looks more like someones hobby site ( content !!!..where is it ??!)
3) The application doesnt have an intuitive look and feel and things dont come naturally to the user as a MS product.
4) the messages/ prompts were written by some guy who doesnt know the grammer of the english language !! i didnt know if i should click on Yes/No !!!
5) Google results are very poor for the product.

Been working on .NET since Beta 1 but even then i had more documentation then.... hmm.. im begining to see the light ....

Microsoft Acquires Groove Network :
"The nature of work itself has changed. Many of us, for better and worse, work in the office, at home, in hotels, at Starbucks." -- Groove Networks CEO Ray Ozzie, during a conference call last week to discuss his collaboration-software company's acquisition by Microsoft

Microsoft Acquires Grove Network

Groove Network Owner Ray Ozzie now another CTO at MS
Ray Ozzie was one of the creators of Lotus Notes !!

Groove products to integrate with Longhorn and the upcoming version of MS Office

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates
revealed his company's collaboration and communication vision
yesterday and unveiled two new Microsoft Office System products,
Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 (code-named Istanbul) and
Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1), and
one new service, Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2005. Gates also
highlighted some of the technologies that Microsoft plans to ship in
the next Office version, code-named Office 12.

Multiple Child Aggregation:
An eyeopener docuement on Multiple Child Aggregation here
What ive been critizing all along seems to be the best approach .. duhhhh....
The document only describes the scenario on SQL Server and so the performance on Oracle is still debatable ;)