An old, but excellent bit from Jared Spool:
We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings. … Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in.
Then, it gets better, or perhaps worse …
We had friends in the Microsoft Office group, so we asked them about the choice of delivering the feature disabled. ... It turns out the reason the feature was disabled in that release was not because they had thought about the user’s needs. Instead, it was because a programmer had made a decision to initialize the config.ini file with all zeroes.[The programmer’s assumption was that] at some point later, someone would tell him what the “real defaults” should be. Nobody ever got around to telling him. ... The users’ assumption that Microsoft had given this careful consideration turned out not to be the case.
I'm positive that Microsoft is not alone in doing this. I’d even go so far as to speculate that the programmer in question wasn’t as apathetic as the brief detail above makes him out to be, but likely raised the issue several times and was ignored, or even told to back off. This happens far more often than any firm would likely care to admit.