Is this slashdot or Classiccmp? Re: Microsoft bashing

Johnny Billquist wrote: The concept of doing a reinstall of the OS every six to twelve months to get the system back into shape is not something any other company that I know of have as a concept. Neither the reboot every week. Reboot every week? How do you get Windows that stable? In my experience, there is a failure mode in which the time required to do essentially ANYTHING will take a sudden leap. At that point, I have learned to save any data in open files IMMEDIATELY, and close the files. Patience is vital in this. I then close every open window, and shut the machine down or restart it. The "big slow" will sometimes clear on its own, but in maybe 10% of the cases, it ends with a system hang. "Big slows" are possible after less than 24 hours of serious use, and likely after about two days. I don't call this stable. I recommend that my clients shut down their (workstation) machines each night. That keeps the problem at bay. I imagine this problem is a memory or stack leak. What irks me is that Microsoft has been collecting billions of dollars from computer users for decades, with many millions of users of the software, and THIS is the best they can do? I mean, seriously. I went from having to boot my home system every day to ward of the uglies to simply ignoring it, and letting it run for months at a time, running Linux. I futz around with my hardware often enough that I've never encountered a single problem I could identify as having been caused by Linux. Considering the money they have gotten far and away, the very BEST operating system ever conceived. That clearly has not happened. Cripes, a bunch of unorganized hackers put together a much more stable system. IBM, involved in O/S writing for only a short time produced OS/2, which was far superior to Windows of the time -- in everything but marketing. Historically, compare it with dBase.... The product started, I believe, as the Condor database. It was terrible. Whatever background things went on with it becoming dBase, I'm not sure, but when the product started selling well (mostly through lack of non-risible competition) the money from the increased sales was put, in large measure, into fixing bugs, and making it more usable. The popularity of the product increased its reliability, and hence, its market appeal. Product sales and product quality both spiraled upwards. It was wonderful to behold. So, why is the same not happening with Windows? Windows XP was released in, I believe, 2000, and the next version, Vista, wasn't released for SEVEN YEARS. That is geologic ages in computer software years. And, after seven years, Vista is the result? There are MANY more computers now than in the early 1980s, and Microsoft has a MUCH bigger percentage of the market than Ashton-Tate ever dreamed of. By all rights, Windows Vista should be software that approaches the borders of divinity. Instead, each new release of Windows is like a beta test. And, even if you give Microsoft a bye with Vista, after seven years and many millions of users, Windows XP should be utterly rock-stable. HAH! Heck, with the exception of MS/PC-DOS 5.0, I don't know of a single version X.0 Microsoft product that could be described as anything other than broken. I can accept this in a little company struggling to survive -- but of all the billions received for XP.... How much went into development of Vista? Either they short-changed us by devoting too few resources to the project, or they are one of the least competent software development teams in history. Is this "bashing" Microsoft? Personally, I see it as reporting. Warren