yeap, we're the great fudgers - we avoid confrontation, heck, recent study showed that if New Zealand was offered a benevolent dictator and ran things better than now - most would ok it.

Sure, there will be a few loud people who will kick up a stink, but the rest of NZ will comtinue moving. The anti-smacking bill isn't going to get removed, nor any of the other reforms introduced by Labour. Both parties talk about change but the reality is that they keep the status quo once they get it - then add more of their own laws to the sporgusboard.

Its unfortunate that the green's are the only part who have their IT sorted out - and yet their economic and social policy royally sucks. How come there are so many idiots on the right - specifically, complete ludites when it comes to IT?

How about a much simpler reason - it plain well sucks giant donkey balls.

We're talking about a device which only works with Windows, only available in a small mumber of countries (I don't give a shit about the music service - you can put music on it without a fucking music service so the need to 'roll out the service' is a bullshit excuse) and the software sucks balls.

Its a top to bottom epic failure - and its in the mold of Microsoft NEVER to learn from these failures or more correctly, learn from its rivals who are making gains. Then again, Microsoft is kinda like a mini-America, the world uses metric, the US uses imperial. The world uses 240V, and the uses 110V etc. etc.