As it seeks to sign up large corporations for its server software and shake the bad publicity that comes with chronic attacks from computer viruses, Microsoft has concluded that its decades-long practice of putting out "good enough" software is no longer good enough.

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"The joke inside Microsoft has been that quality is job 1.1 -- the real bugs don't get fixed until after the release, when the service patches come out," says Greg DeMichillie, a Directions on Microsoft analyst who spent nine years at the software maker. "It's not yet clear that quality really is a top priority across all of Microsoft's lines of business."

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But it's still unclear whether developers rigorously stick to the plan. On the one hand, in the latter stages of Exchange's development, programmers must file a change request when they want to rejigger the code, and managers meet daily in a war room to make their calls on the requests -- just as at IBM. A deep database underlies Exchange's staggering 6 million lines of code, and records every single alteration -- just as at IBM. But programmers are still encouraged to get creative and take risks. "We give a lot of freedom to our developers for a reason -- they're smart people," says Betsy Speare, the release manager for Exchange. "We're willing to make a mistake and catch it, so long as we don't miss an opportunity."

In other words, Microsoft is trying to be both rigorous and nimble. "They want to be able to react quickly to competitors and market changes," says DeMichillie. "So they're trying to have it both ways. Can they succeed? No one has before."