>> No. But you make it sound as if all M$'s problems are because computer 
>> hardware is unreliable.
> 
> IME, every time I am called because of a friend/family computer "not 
> working", it is nothing to do with MS.  I can give you a long list of 
> reasons, mostly due to other software, hardware malfunction or drivers, 
> but none MS.

Most of the problems I get to look at aren't due to M$ either - but a 
significant number of them are.

>> This is manifestly not the case. M$'s problems are because they 
>> produce poor quality products.
> 
> I use MS products daily on 3 or 4 machines and cannot remember the last 
> time one of them crashed or when MS Office behaved badly.

Actual OS crashes are fairly rare, assuming you use your computer in a 
sane mannar.

But I'm not just talking about complete crashes of the entire OS, or 
even crashes of a single application. I'm talking about the whole 
quality equation - how M$ products in general tend to be unecessarily 
complicated, poorly documented, resource-inefficient, insecure, and so 
forth.

> You mention corrupted Word documents, but IIRC we decided that was due 
> to everyone using the same template/file that was corrupted and 
> spreading this corruption through all your documents.  This is not 
> really a fault of MS Office, especially when you didn't even use the 
> "Open and Repair" command which would have probably fixed the problem.

Let's suppose that a particular Word document is corrupted. Why should 
that make Word crash? Shouldn't it just pop up a message saying "I can't 
read this file, it seems to be corrupted"? Isn't that what "graceful 
failure" is all about? But no, Word just crashes outright.

I opened the same file in OpenOffice, and it just opened up as if there 
was nothing wrong with it. I saved it again, and it has worked in Word 
ever since.

Why is it that Word, a premium product designed and produced by the 
richest software company on earth, cannot do something that OpenOffice 
can? The people developing OO didn't even have access to a description 
of the file format; they had to reverse-engineer it. And yet, they 
somehow did a better job than the people who *designed* that file 
format. How can that be right??

(Let us not go into the fact that Word costs almost infinity times more 
than OpenOffice to start with...)

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