The longer I think about it the stronger is my belief that MS Project should be really two separate products driven and marketed independently.

I can understand your concerns to some point – I've never worked in such a large environment using MS Project so extensively, but I guess I went way further than 90% of MSP users. My usage was still limited to what I believe are simple features (at least most of them) but I'm aware how much more you could achieve with MS Project in such complex environment you work in.

On the other hand when you buy MS Project you get all the stuff no matter whether you need them or not, budgeting being a nice example of premium feature which is rarely used by majority of users.

I don't agree that MSFT focuses on 90% of project users. If they did we'd see lightweight web-based version of Project with limited feature set sold in SaaS model. I actually have no idea what MSFT focuses on with their marketing effort on MSP. If you as a premium user are unsatisfied and the same is on the other end of scale the marketing strategy must be flawed.

So a few questions:
1. What's your alternative?
2. What are the details of the management and marketing of MSP – I know the Product Manager.
3. You're correct about the 80% to 90% of the users create simple waterfall plans.

The issue is there are 10's of 1,000's of users (out of the millions of licenses) that create large (5K to 50K) line schedules that manage 100's of billions of dollars of projects world wide.

The real marketing issue is MSFT focuses on the 90% user base and essentially ignores the 10% (me and the 10's of 1,000's of PP&C people). We've had this discussion with MSFT and they know where the revenue comes from.

So when Andrew speaks about MSP is suspect he's in the category of the 90% users that only build simple schedules for straight forward self contained projects.

Our programs are a small minority compared to the total population (head count), but likely represent the vast majority – I'd conjecture 90% – of the total dollar value of projects. A $20M to $50M project in space and defense of considered "small." One joke in the local defense business here in Denver is a major firm wouldn't bend over to pick up a $10M bill laying on the sidewalk. Too small, too paper work for a small return.

Of course when one misuses the tool it's not the tool which should be blamed and that's exactly what I was trying to point (fully agree with you here).

On a side note I think both product management and marketing for MS Project is completely screwed.

Maybe what Andrew is saying is "I haven't figured out how to use the tools to do anything other than a simple waterfall schedule in Project."

As a user of MSFT Project Server, Deltek, and Primevera – all enterprise project management tools – NONE of the attributes Andrew describes are the case in practice.

His narrow view starts and end with the statement MSFT Project was "created to support waterfall. This is course is typical Andrew nonsense." I'd love to have Andrew come and see how we manage programs with 10's of 1000's of lines of MSFT project tasks spread over the entire USA, with 20 or so major subcontractors.

But as the self appointed leader of PM 2.0, it may be difficult to expand his horizons with actual projects performing work in ways he claims can't be done.

Sad actually, because there is so much improvement needed in all areas of PM.