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Microsoft: Because Bugs are Cool
h_orion writes "According to Mr. Gates, Microsoft recieves 'Less than one percent' call volume in relation to bugs. He also blames the users lack of knowledge as a cause of some of these bugs. He goes on to say that the feeling of frustration that people hold towards bugs is a sociological issue, rather than technical saying that people complain about software bugs 'Because it's cool.' Read more in this interview." Boy, where do you even begin...
Nobody demanding to see the original transcript?
No, those links at the bottom don't lead to the original transcript, only some German "analysis" of the original transcript.
Because of this blatant lack of evidence, everything else is suspect.
I have been pwned because my
There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.
I want my copy of Windows 98 to go more than 3 days without a reset. Does that mean I'm in the minority? Or is OS stability just a 'feature'?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
1995.
That's the year of the quotes attributed to Bill.
No one needs more than 640k of RAM.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
Does this interview sound fake to anyone else? I mean, come on:
Gates:
No! If you really think there's a bug you should report a bug. Maybe you're not using it properly. Have you ever considered that?
FOCUS:
Yeah, I did...
Gates:
It turns out Luddites don't know how to use software properly, so you should look into that.
---
Gates:
No, only if that is what'll sell!
Gates is a businessman - I don't think he'd be stupid enough to say this kind of stuff in an interview. I want to see the original source documents.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
Given the grammar transcript I would say that a lot of what was said in that interview was horribly mangaled. This is not current and not news.
At least it wasn't done in mandarin chinese where pronunciation is the difference between horse and mother.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
How do
This link is not even on FOCUS magazine's website
This post fooled you all
The interview link in the post is on The Cantrip Corpus
website
cantrip: (kän tRip), n. (Chiefly Scot.)
1. a magical charm or enchantment; 2. an elaborate deception or prank.
corpus: (kôr pus), n., pl. -pora,
1. a complete set of writings; 2. a dead body.
I don't use XP, but I know a lot of people who do... I've never heard of such an unstable XP install. Race conditions in C#? I've been coding almost exclusively in C# for over 18 months, and I work with many developers who do too. I'm not denying your claim, but based on my experience I demand a little more evidence before I buy this extraordinary claim.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Please note the date of the interview. This is almost 8 years old.
If I were paranoid, this sounds like a MS troll to elicit uneducated, kneejerk reactions to ancient history.
Beware, some of the comments will appear in MS press releases in order to show the "infantile" level of OS supporters.
geo
the (unconfirmed) rumours were he used powdered cocaine. He has admited to having a drinking problem, which he has since resolved.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
I'm reasonably sure this is real. At least i remember this doing the "rounds" a long long time ago and i dont remember it being discredited. I also remember the full transcription of the interview being a lot longer. Gates has evidently had a good bit of "PR for dummies" coaching since then.
:) ). You could ask him to verify.
Also, it credits a few people for translations, eg inaky perez gonzalez for translation into spanish - iirc he wrote the original USB stack for linux and he now works for intel (unless there's 2 of him
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Yeah, it's real, yeah, it's really old. Was mentioned on Slashdot loooong ago.
Bill Gates DOES act like that if you confront him instead of kissing his heinie in an interview. If you don't think he could possibly be unprofessional, watch his videotaped deposition from the antitrust trial (or read the transcript).
Remember, the software is a reflection of the management. Windows 95/98 have any bugs? MS releases junk? Perhaps they don't have your best interests in mind.
Actually, I saw this full interview back when it first came out. I don't remember the source of it, but back then no one doubted it authenticity. Other points of interest Gates brought up in the interview:
* Upgrades aren't for fixing bugs. People won't upgrade just for bug fixes.
* When asked about competitor's products, he just kinda laughed them all off and basically said "it's obvious our products are better in all aspects."
* Specifically took pot shots at Geoworks, and I think OS/2 also.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/gatesivu.htm
http://www.urbanlegends.com/celebrities/bill.gate
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
Either way I don't see this as an interesting piece. The reporter plays it stupid and tries to get Gates angry so he will say a bunch of stupid and incoherent shit.
Liberty.
I had to reboot my fscking XP machine TWICE today. Just crashed for no apparent reason. Meanwhile all my Macs, Linux, and FreeBSd systems didn't miss a beat and are sporting an average of a couple months uptime.
Minor bugs my ass.
Why do I run 2000/XP, you ask? Because a couple of our clueless app vendors only support it, and believe me, I bitch like hell at them but we don't have an alternative yet. The sooner I can ditch this MSFT shit the better.
You post a link to a phony interview dated 1995 and pass it off as a representation of Microsoft's current position on making quality software. Did you guys even read this article?
Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, yet this "interview" reads like it was conducted with the hobo that collects soda cans from my trash.I remember reading the article a couple years ago. It's funny to think that these days people would think it was fake.
Gates has been known to attack interviewers in the past. In recent years he has been trying to clean up his image a bit and not seem like the huge ass hole that he really is. I think Gates is so insulated from the real world that he suffers from Michael Jackson syndrome, where he is able to create his own reality. When he is confronted with the truth he becomes defensive.
I remember when he said that. I think it was at some conference. He may not remember it, that doesn't effect reality unless you have lousy fact checkers. Not that it really matters, we've all said silly things in the past, and relative to 64K, 640K wasn't so bad. Plus there were little utilities that gave you an extra 100-150K, as long as you didn't have a Hercules card or a bulky (IBM) BIOS. This was useful if you used one of those pre-emptive multitasking programs, you could run your BBS in 200K, a DOS shell in 16K, and leave the rest for applications and TSRs.
It came from a tech satire website. The interview did not take place. You may now put down the pitchforks and torches...
No ! It came from a "FOCUS" article from 1995 and is really took place
cu
I used to work at a company who did MS support, and the Knowledge Base is probably the most helpful tool I had. It was fairly fast, and I heard the database we searched thru was quite a few terabytes. The only thing that I would liked would have been a way to link between articles and such, as they were just text files.
I would also have to say that from my 4 yrs of phone support experience with MS products, not very many of them were because of *bugs*. I was able to pull up cases where the problem was a bug, but that usually happened with fairly large buisness accounts that didn't use frontline support so we never saw any of that. Probably the biggest causes of support calls were these:
a - Outdated drivers
b - Just too much installed to where they had 20+ icons in the system tray
c - how-to issues, people not knowing how to do something, etc.
I think the support there is pretty good, it all matters if you get a good tech or not, but overall its pretty good.
Most online versions of the article claim that it was in the German weekly magazine FOCUS (nr.43, October 23, 1995, pages 206-212), and a search in the focus archives reveals that FOCUS had an interview with Gates in that issue (third result). However, to see if the text is the same, you'll have to pay them (and understand German).
print "Yet another p{erl,ython} hacker\n",
And it turns out that it _is_ the same Wired article!
It came from a tech satire website. The interview did not take place. You may now put down the pitchforks and torches...
Your information is wrong. The interview actually appeared in the german focus magazine in 1995. Look at the
Focus archive if you can read german and are willing to spend some euros.
-- Marcus
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/17.44.html#subj11.
to see the original interview before it was translated to german (and then back to english). It is however only the same part of the interview as in the linked article (ie the beginning is not shown there either).
The interview is real... but it is also from 1995...
It was interesting to learn that the 640k comment is an urban legend. I'll have to remember to tell people that.
But, it's also too bad that your love for a meglomaniac renders you unable to see the truth about his character. Someone managed to find a source I would consider authoritative, a major academic journal. Here's the post:
l d=-1&commentsort=3&tid=109&mode=thread&pid=5342140 #5342157
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=54440&thresho
and here's the journal article:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/17.44.html#subj11
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Perhaps it was on a humor site because Mr. Bill made a fool of himself in front of the world.
Someone managed to find a source I would consider authoritative, a major academic journal. Here's the post:
l d=-1&commentsort=3&tid=109&mode=thread&pid=5342140 #5342157
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=54440&thresho
and here's the journal article:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/17.44.html#subj11
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Its actually hard to believe this interview is real. Actually is there any proof that it is? Gates sounded very unprofessional and not like himself in the interview, almost like he was attacking the FOCUS interviewer. Anyone else care to comment on this?
It is real. I myself read the article in the printed issue of the magazine.
He was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on the BBC a few years back, probably at about the same time as this interview. Paxman asked him something like "Why is your software so unreliable?" and he answered, "Maybe you aren't using it correctly". So this interview is spot on about Bill's attitude to bugs back then.
The interview was published in October 1995, maybe Bill G has learned beeing more polite in public since back then. IIrc, he used to be a bit more arrogant.
They say you grow older and wiser, after all.
---
The combined human population is enough to feed every living tiger for app. 28000 years.
My 5-person R&D team has found two bugs in Microsoft Products (one in the VB6 runtime and one in MSMQ) in the past year. In both cases, Microsoft was quick to verify the bugs, escalate the issues quickly and provide us with hotfixes. We've had no problem with Microsoft's developer support taking us seriously and working with us to make sure everything rolls along smoothly.
Anyone besides me think that an interview that old is likely to have little or nothing to do with Gates's current mindframe or business? Microsoft couldn't exist today if it was the same as it was in 1995! Few, if any, tech companies could!
Of course that's absolutely inconsequential.
In the phrase "because it's cool", "it" doesn't refer to bugs, but to the action of complaining about bugs.
Bill Gates never said bugs are cool.
Submitters or editors should correct the title.