This post contains lots of oversimplifications that don't do justice to Microsoft, Apple, or FOSS.
First, why do you think pragmatism is weird? As jimbokun pointed out, you're framing it as if it's OK to focus on either design or technical merit, but that trying to do well on both (which is what users actually need) is somehow undesirable.
I think your comment about "MBA-driven design" gets to the heart of your misunderstanding about what a PM is. Neither MBAs nor industrial designers are a substitute for PMs (most of whom are software engineers by training). Tell an industrial designer or an MBA to design Exchange's system for handling the million special cases that come up when handling calendar synchronization. What do you do when two appointments are modified concurrently? What happens on the server when someone deletes their local Outlook data file by accident? When do you treat two similar calendar events as duplicates, when do you treat them as separate, and what's the most logical way to let users resolve duplicates/triplicates? How do you handle the many confusions that arise from people traveling across time zones? Which attributes of a person's calendar should be stored on the server, and which should be customizable on each specific device? I know industrial designers and MBAs who work in the software industry, and they would tell you that this isn't their job.
You also say that the middle ground results in weak consumer products like Vista and Windows Mobile. These two data points are cherry-picked. I could equally say that this middle ground results in great products like Office 2007, SharePoint, Exchange, .NET, Visual Studio, SQL Server, and so on (not fair to limit this to consumer products, since Microsoft's biggest focus is on productivity applications. I could point out Apple's lack of success among business users, but I understand that this is not their strong suit and that's OK. Their ability to deliver for a growing set of high-end consumers makes them a huge success in my eyes.)
Sure, that's true; I should have said "MBAs who are not software engineers". I think, however, that peterb was using "MBA-driven design" to imply "design by someone who knows business but not software engineering", and I replied by using it in the same colloquial sense.
First, why do you think pragmatism is weird? As jimbokun pointed out, you're framing it as if it's OK to focus on either design or technical merit, but that trying to do well on both (which is what users actually need) is somehow undesirable.
I think your comment about "MBA-driven design" gets to the heart of your misunderstanding about what a PM is. Neither MBAs nor industrial designers are a substitute for PMs (most of whom are software engineers by training). Tell an industrial designer or an MBA to design Exchange's system for handling the million special cases that come up when handling calendar synchronization. What do you do when two appointments are modified concurrently? What happens on the server when someone deletes their local Outlook data file by accident? When do you treat two similar calendar events as duplicates, when do you treat them as separate, and what's the most logical way to let users resolve duplicates/triplicates? How do you handle the many confusions that arise from people traveling across time zones? Which attributes of a person's calendar should be stored on the server, and which should be customizable on each specific device? I know industrial designers and MBAs who work in the software industry, and they would tell you that this isn't their job.
You also say that the middle ground results in weak consumer products like Vista and Windows Mobile. These two data points are cherry-picked. I could equally say that this middle ground results in great products like Office 2007, SharePoint, Exchange, .NET, Visual Studio, SQL Server, and so on (not fair to limit this to consumer products, since Microsoft's biggest focus is on productivity applications. I could point out Apple's lack of success among business users, but I understand that this is not their strong suit and that's OK. Their ability to deliver for a growing set of high-end consumers makes them a huge success in my eyes.)