I doubt the top-level people (responsible for things like the 32 G requirement) at MS are really that dumb, because if they were, we would probably hear more horror stories. Ballmer is dumb, but he's a little high-level for that kind of misfeature. No, I think the problem is an emergent property of the MS bureaucracy system; everybody in it hates it and hates the products it produces, but it has too much inertia for anybody who wants to fix it to do so.