I read a couple of things today that got me thinking again about the importance of making tough decisions, and why some companies often fail to do so. My take: most of the hesitation comes from the desire to please everyone -- customers and people inside the organization -- and the associated fear of pissing people off. Not exactly a Pulitzer Prize winning inference I know, but there it is.

Anyway, when I say tough decision, it's really something that can come in all sorts of flavors. In my previous post regarding this topic I talked about tough decisions concerning product lines, specifically the Windows Vista product line. Another popular area when it comes to making tough decisions (or lack thereof), is product preferences.

Christopher Fahey recently wrote a great post detailing his odyssey of attempting to change a trackpad property on a Windows laptop. The number of screenshots alone tells the story.

Now, as you can tell, Microsoft is the most popular whipping boy when it comes to this, partly because they are the juggernaut that they are, and also because they have the longest rap sheet. While certainly not an excuse, it would be safe to assume that their gigantic bureaucracy has something to do with their inability to make these kinds of decisions.

But it isn't all negatives for Microsoft. Every once in a while they do something that has them sounding like they have a vision and the guts to follow through on it. Take for instance this article about DX10 and Vista. It is more of a feature decision than UI decision, but it shows how they made a decision, and a tough one at that. At the risk of pissing some people off they determined what was best for the product and stuck to it. I'm sure they had pressure from game makers, hardware manufacturers, and customers, but they took a position. Whether it was right or wrong, we'll see, but they have at least taken a step to define a clear upgrade incentive for Vista -- something (as the article states) has continually confused consumers. They have made the upgrade an upgrade, and that is a good thing.

This is a topic that will be debated forever, I'm sure, but I thought I'd through one more case into the discussion.