You covered a good topic, and nailed it.

I have seen that vendors typically are more worried about what new features they can market than fixing existing bugs. Marketing drives sales, sales drives profits, why should they worry about bugs that only affect existing, paying customers?

Arguably I work with vendors other than Microsoft, and none of them have the scale of implementations that they do. I think that makes it worse. At least Microsoft has to fight the media coverage. Smaller vendors frequently can ignore or counter negative media coverage more easily.

Some of the best vendors I deal with offer customer portals where you can report bugs, and even vote on "enhancements". Rarely can you vote on bug fixes though.

I believe our system (Capitalist) is the best one going, but I also see many instances where short term profits trump good long term business sense. I don't have an answer to fix that, but I do wish that sales and marketing were restrained somewhat in the influence they wield.