What the ...., Microsoft?

In the run up to Christmas we seem to have a very light workload and I thought I'd give MS Sharepoint a try to see what all the fuss is about.

I got the ISO from MSDN and after using my newly acquired mad PowerCLI skills to clone a new VM, I ran the Sharepoint installer.

I clicked on the install pre-requisites option and after a few minutes it stopped working, why? because it could not connect to the internet, say what?

You expect an enterprise grade application to have internet access? This is insane, this is the sort of crap that really makes me wish I had nothing to do with Microsoft.

Anyway, you can find all the pre-requisites here, download them and then you can install Sharepoint 2010 SP1, maybe.

What I really don't understand is why they are not contained in the ISO: if they are pre-requisites then they should be in the ISO. It's only the optional pre-requisites, that's a good oxymoron, that should need to be downloaded, but mandatory pre-requisites? 

I sometimes don't understand Microsoft. It seems to bend over backwards to make life easier for everybody, particularly developers, and every so often you get stuff like this, which makes no sense whatsoever.