Posted on 4-10-2002

Microsoft Works - Oxymoron
By Alan Marston (Photo shows Bill Gates, founder-owner of Microsoft
Corporation)

Disclaimer: The opinion below in every way reflect the biased opinion of
the owner of an ISP that has since PlaNet's inception in 1992 had to supply
FREE support to thousands of people who pay large sums of money for
Microsoft (MS) products that are full of bugs and which regularly crash,
and small amounts of money to PlaNet which is expected and has managed to
operate 24/7/365 for 10 years - without ever once using a Microsoft product
or operating system. PlaNet has supported itself AND MS products, without
any payment for the latter which takes up 90% of our user support budget.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 2 — Microsoft today released data about its Watson
online error-reporting service, which the company says has had a
significant impact on increasing the stability of its software. The company
has struggled in recent years to improve its credibility in the face of an
industry reputation for error-prone programs. A reputation it well
deserves, but which has not stopped MS's owners being amoung the top 10
richest people in the world. How can that contradiction be? One has to
surmise that aggressive marketing and the willingness to use
industrial-financial muscle has something to do with MS's `success', plus,
there are thousand's of companies and governments which are in effect
supporting MS products at no cost to MS.

Microsoft said that the quality of its software had improved as a result of
the work of programmers in its Office group who produced the Watson system,
which reports and then transmits to Microsoft real-world data about
customer crashes. Anyone who still believes MS press releases has to fall
into the category of the `reckless consumer'. The problems and high costs
of MS products are legion, viz the info available to anyone who spends 5
minutes on the web and uses the search entry `Microsoft problems'. I
remember the `everything is now fixed' propaganda from MS back in 1992 with
MS-DOS 6.

Today Microsoft released a copy of a message sent to some customers by its
chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, detailing the service and describing it
as a new pipeline for customer feedback. In the letter, Mr. Ballmer drew
parallels between his first job, where he marketed brownie and blueberry
muffin mixes at Proctor & Gamble, and the challenges in pleasing customers
at a software company like Microsoft. Sigh... wait for it - "Satisfying
customers is what it's all about with technology products, too," he wrote.

I suppose MS will survive yet again in the face of overwhelmingly better
and lower-cost and `open source' software - because perception is still
reality in this wonderful global economic world we try to live in and
because billions of dollars of time and money are spent supporting MS, at
no cost to MS.