"Orchid XP v7" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:47b0bb28@news.povray.org...

> Before M$ came along, buying software was like buying any other product;
> people *expected* it to work properly. And if it didn't, it was taken
> back to the shop. Companies that regularly produced poor quality junk
> didn't stay around for very long.

And how much software did you buy before MS was around? Don't confuse
correlation with causation.

The difference is the scale. Before MS became big (and I'm talking before
around 1988 here) software was a niche market. Small, specialised, very few
users, small.

I'm emphasising small, because small software is 'easy' to write. The biger
the app becomes (lines of code, modules, classes, etc) the harder it becomes
to maintain, the more bugs creep in, the more chance for unexpected
behaviours, etc It becomes harder and harder to add new features required
for version 2.

At the same time, you can't go back and scrap the codebase and write from
scratch. It takes too long (time in which you're loosing market share to
other companies who didn't scrap the code base) and you're loosing time that
was invested in the first in bugfixing. Witness Netscape's mistake of trying
to rewrite the code base completely for one version (I think it was 6 or 7)

Ask anyone who's worked on large software projects.

> After M$, it became somehow "OK" for software to not actually work
> properly.

Honestly, I'll take MS's products any day over some of the crap that I've
seen from ISVs

> The people who write the cheques? Or the people who have to *use* the
> software? They aren't the same people. ;-)

I'm talking about Joe Average User going down to the shop to buy a boxed
piece of software.

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