Gail Shaw wrote:

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

Quite a lot. (Well, my parents anyway, not me personally. I didn't have 
any money...)

We had premptive multitasking operating systems and large C compilers 
and ray tracers and modellers and music sequencing software and complex 
computer games and so on and so forth. And they all worked properly. Any 
programs that didn't were laughed at and thrown away. (Heck, we didn't 
even have protected execution yet, so a single bug could shut down your 
entire machine. And yet this virtually never happened...)

> 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 don't know that it was that specialised - from the number of consumer 
magazines about it on the shelves, I wouldn't have thought so. I don't 
have hard numbers though...

> I'm emphasising small, because small software is 'easy' to write.

I don't really see how the software M$ writes is any "bigger" or "more 
complex" than what existed before.

>> 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

M$ certainly don't produce the *worst* software on the market - I've 
seen crud that's much worse. OTOH, nobody buys that stuff. People do buy 
M$ products.

I've also seen software that's much more reliable. *cough* POV-Ray. When 
was the last time you saw it crash? Similarly, have you *ever* seen 
Linux crash? [A huge number of Linux applications are hopelessly buggy, 
but the OS itself seems rock-steady as far as I can tell.]

Obviously, when you're not being paid to produce software, you can spend 
"infinite" resources on debugging. But take, for example, NI Reaktor, or 
Steinburg Cubase. I have yet to see either of those crash, and they're 
far more complicated than M$ Word. (I believe they might even be cheaper 
too... I'd have to check prices.)

>> 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.

I think if you could actually explain to Joe Average "hey, *this* one 
NEVER EVER CRASHES", that'd be pretty impressed.

Of course, you can write that on the box, but why would anyone believe 
what it says on the box? It's easy to claim your software has fewer bugs 
- even M$ claim that! (Surely that should be illegal under the trade 
descriptions act?)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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