Gail Shaw wrote:

>> ...and *this* is why Micro$oft is allowed to exist. >_<
> 
> Any just about every other software company in existance. It's not unique to
> MS.

I beg to differ.

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.

After M$, it became somehow "OK" for software to not actually work 
properly. If M$ can be credited with one original invention, this is it. 
They've somehow made it "acceptable" for software to not really work 
properly. Year after year, they churn out semi-functional bloatware, and 
yet everybody keeps buying it. And it doesn't quite work properly, but 
people think this is somehow "normal".

This is probably why people have such a hard time convincing their 
bosses that bad code should be replaced; bosses [and everybody else] 
*expect* software to not quite work properly any more. It's somehow 
acceptable now...

> In fact, through dealings with MS's tech support and a lot of vender's
> tech support, I've found that the people at MS care more. Far too many
> software venders have the attitude "You bought it, now its your problem"

The company I work for isn't nearly big enough for *any* tech support 
people to speak to us, so I couldn't comment...

>> Sure, users don't care about pretty code. I'm sure if you
>> asked them though, they care rather a lot about *reliable* code...
> 
> They'll probably say they will, but offer, for the same price, a piece of
> software with 10 features that's fairly reliable and a piece of software
> with 4 features that's very reliable and see which they'll choose to buy.
> 
> I'll be you anything, 80%+ will go for the one with more features,
> rationalising that it can do more.

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

[But no, I won't bet any actual money, because then I'd loose. No matter 
what I bet on, I loose. I even bet on the chemical symbol for tin - a 
value that cannot ever change - and *still* lost!]

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

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Jeremy M. Praay <jer### [at] questsoftwarecmo> wrote:
> In one of my recent favorites, the programmer had done a query like:
> SELECT * FROM CUSTOMERS

> Then he went through every single record (in a loop), until he found the 
> record that matched the value he was looking for, or hit the end of the 
> file.

  That seems to be a rather common thing people do. It's like they read
the first page of the SQL book they were given and skipped the rest because
it "works".

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Before M$ came along, buying software was like buying any other product; 
> people *expected* it to work properly. 

Ummmm. I'll have to beg to differ with you here.  How much software did 
you use before MS was around?

The thing that MS did that nobody else really did well was integrate 
lots of layers of stuff from lots of people.  You never had one piece of 
software that ran on multiple operating systems before MS. You never had 
reliable device drivers from third-party vendors before MS was around. 
You never had six layers of functionality, all of which had to work 
together, coming from different competing companies, before MS was around.

MS happened to be doing Windows when the complexity of stuff that 
average users saw just took off. *That* is what you're seeing.

> After M$, it became somehow "OK" for software to not actually work 
> properly. If M$ can be credited with one original invention, this is it. 

I'll disagree with this one too. In some areas, software is like that. 
Not in all fields, however. When's the last time your DVD player crashed?

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> The thing that MS did that nobody else really did well was integrate
> lots of layers of stuff from lots of people.

when you're given control over the infrastructure software powering IBM's
microcomputer offering and its dozens of successful clones, you can do
anything, including dictating standards and APIs.

> You never had one piece of
> software that ran on multiple operating systems before MS.

which multiple OSes from MS?  The home edition and office edition?

> You never had
> reliable device drivers from third-party vendors before MS was around.

change MS for monopoly and you'll understand why they work so well.

> You never had six layers of functionality, all of which had to work
> together, coming from different competing companies, before MS was around.

here too.

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On Mon, 11 Feb 2008 18:03:34 -0800, Darren New wrote:

> When's the last time your DVD player crashed?

About a year ago for our Sony.  Known firmware issue, but it takes a Sony 
technician to reflash it, apparently - 6 weeks without the thing if we 
wanted to get the problem fixed.

Jim

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"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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nemesis wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> The thing that MS did that nobody else really did well was integrate
>> lots of layers of stuff from lots of people.
> 
> when you're given control over the infrastructure software powering IBM's
> microcomputer offering and its dozens of successful clones, you can do
> anything, including dictating standards and APIs.

Indeed yes.  On the other hand, lots of people had monopolies over their 
own systems, and never managed to support this properly: CP/M, Radio 
Shack, etc.  Apple didn't do too bad a job with the Apple ][. Of course, 
the hardware was much more primitive at the time.

How recently has UNIX not used source distributions for programs? How 
much UNIX shareware could you download as executables, say, in 1998?

>> You never had one piece of
>> software that ran on multiple operating systems before MS.
> 
> which multiple OSes from MS?  The home edition and office edition?

DOS, Win98, WinXP.

And before you say "Windows NT is the same OS as Windows 98", remember 
all the people that accuse MS of stealing Windows NT from DEC? :-)

Show me an executable that runs on TRS-DOS and CP/M?

It's only now (as in, since OS X) that the Mac is starting to manage 
this as well. A couple other systems managed it as well (VM/CMS, for 
example), but nothing affordable to mere mortals.

>> You never had
>> reliable device drivers from third-party vendors before MS was around.
> 
> change MS for monopoly and you'll understand why they work so well.

I'm not sure what that sentence means, given the unusual syntax.

>> You never had six layers of functionality, all of which had to work
>> together, coming from different competing companies, before MS was around.
> 
> here too.

If what you're saying is that MS being a monopoly is what made this 
possible, then sure, I might agree with that. It doesn't mean that makes 
it easier or less prone to mistakes. Just like saying "Cars that go 200 
MPH crash more often than cars that go 30 MPH" isn't disputed by a 
complaint that they got exclusive use of the race track.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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> nemesis wrote:
>> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>>> You never had
>>> reliable device drivers from third-party vendors before MS was around.
>>
>> change MS for monopoly and you'll understand why they work so well.
> 
> I'm not sure what that sentence means, given the unusual syntax.

It means: In the sentence "You never had reliable device drivers from 
third-party vendors before MS was around", replace "MS" with "monopoly", 
and you'll understand why they are sort-of-reliable now.

[not my opinion, just clarifying his sentence]

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> How recently has UNIX not used source distributions for programs? How
> much UNIX shareware could you download as executables, say, in 1998?

I don't quite understand how this has to do with anything in the discussion.
But source has always been available in some way or another in the *nix
community.

> DOS, Win98, WinXP.

Win9x did not support DOS programs: they simply had DOS included to handle
those.  So, basically, M$ can afford backwards compatibility by simply letting
old code handle old code, because old code everyone's using is M$ code, not
someone's else.  Single vendor, single solution.

> And before you say "Windows NT is the same OS as Windows 98", remember
> all the people that accuse MS of stealing Windows NT from DEC? :-)

WNT <- VMS

same engineer...

> Show me an executable that runs on TRS-DOS and CP/M?

Thank God the industry has settled on standards for interoperation.

> If what you're saying is that MS being a monopoly is what made this
> possible, then sure, I might agree with that.

yes, that's it exactly.

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"Jeremy M. Praay" <jer### [at] questsoftwarecmo> wrote:
> Working where I do, I've found quite a few WTF's myself.

yes, offices are full with it.  and they generally come from programmers not
well aquainted with povray... :)

> In one of my recent favorites, the programmer had done a query like:
> SELECT * FROM CUSTOMERS

in my place, people seem to love using cursors and manually looping over it
rather than using a simpler and much faster INNER JOIN.

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