On Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:46:00 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> And I've always said that M$'s greatest achievement is in *redefining*
> what people will consider to be "good enough".
> 
> Not so many years ago, software that wasn't 100% crash-free was
> unacceptable. Today this is considered "normal". And it's all due to M$.

Well, again, fair play to Microsoft - computing has gotten a lot more 
complex over the last 20 years.

>> That doesn't mean that they wouldn't/couldn't/shouldn't go through a
>> process of striving for continuous improvement in their development
>> processes.  And clearly that's something they do (I've known people who
>> have worked in MS Engineering, so this isn't conjecture on my part -
>> it's based on conversations with former colleagues who worked at MS in
>> that capacity).
> 
> Really? It's actually to their best advantage economically to make their
> software as inefficient as possible. (Although making it work
> *correctly* would be beneficial to them, making it work *efficiently*
> would cause them to lose money.)

Are you old enough to be *that* cynical? ;-)

There is something to what you say, though; one of the factors that I've 
seen (and heard discussed) that caused the decline of NetWare was that it 
was *too* stable.  People installed the server and forgot about it.  Look 
at the rather well-known story about the school that actually closed in a 
NetWare 2.x server in a closet because they forgot about it.  Not an 
urban legend, this actually happened (University of North Carolina IIRC).

There were other factors as well that contributed to the decline of 
NetWare, including some really bad missteps on Novell's part, rebranding 
it to "IntraNetWare", which I consider one of the biggest blunders the 
company has made *and* not necessarily learned from as well as it should 
have been).  Having a bit of instability keeps the system in mind, and MS 
does an outstanding job of keeping people on the "upgrade treadmill".

Jim

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