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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...
...face it, you have to be. But a blue screen, or any sort of error dialogue is not purely psychological. I respect my subconscious quite a bit, but I suspect it to be quite incapable of conjuring up indecipherable addresses related to memory...
...either that or I have some extremely low self esteem.
Bill thinks it's cool to waggle back and forth in his chair like an unloved monkey.
What are the other 99% of calls about? Oh yeah. Crap documentation that tells you the obvious half of what the tool or call does, but doesn't bother to tell you what its actual behavior or use is.
I wonder if he's counting the 3-10 times a week my XP machine says it's sending a bug report back to Microsoft.
I've had to stop using Outlook Express entirely because it won't work, and Microsoft was no help.
And I've already run into race conditions in the event handling for C#.
People report bugs not because it's cool, but because they think Microsoft might just have a desire to help.
How wrong they are, Mr Gates seems to be saying.
Funny, I used to get lots of letters from irate fanboys who asserted that it was an obvious fake. Not one of them could spell.
Why do you wish it was more like Bugzilla? The KB is, well, a knowledge base, not a bug tracking system. I also find the MS KB far easier to search and than Bugzilla. Nonetheless searching the MS KB can still be frustrating.
Did anyone else notice?
from http://www.cantrip.org/
The Welcome:
cantrip: (kän tRip), n. (Chiefly Scot.)
1. a magical charm or enchantment;
2. an elaborate deception or prank.
Who owns your data?
This sounds faked, especially because the Focus Magazine homepage is littered with Microsoft paraphenelia and is tied in with MSN. You people need to stop taking everything against Microsoft and running with it! Sometimes it is just a hoax!
Didn't get out much in high school eh? All the "cool" kids get hammered and puke everywhere to prove how cool they are. On a more on topic note, it would be interesting to see how many tech support / bug report calls microsoft actually gets. I'd see most users calling whoever sold them their computer or failing that the manufacturer. I'm assuming most direct calls microsoft gets come from their big customers which you would think mostly would be tech support or bug reports and I'm sure that costs a pretty penny.
Check out my life
It turns out Luddites don't know how to use software properly
So does that mean that most people are Luddites? In short, yes. When was the last time that a normal (non-technical) manager wanted to change their computers to Linux?
Oh, I know it's real because I think I still have a copy of the magazine in which it first appeared. It was either 'Time' or 'Wired'. It was a highly amusing read, and had questions that only a non-American popular media journalist would've asked at the time. I believe the interviewer was German.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
That is 8 years ago. 8 years ago Microsoft was positively pleasant compared with current behaviour.
So who cares what Bill said (or maybe didn't say) back then?
"Cats like plain crisps"
taking a seat on two sides of the issue - i, a designer, and a very good friend of mine writing for WASP - i get to hear a lot of complaints from other designers about bugs in mozilla, and my friends hears from his other programmer friends about the bugs in mozilla that they've submitted to bugzilla.
complaining is cool. submitting the actually bug doesn't happen often. automated bug reports tend not to tell jack (unless of course you want to send a tidy package containing every spec of information about your machine every time there's an application level crash).
Not sure if it's been pointed out, but. From what I've studied of linguistic transcription (read: English Geek present), it is normally considered a big faux pas to include emphasis notation (italics, excessive exclaimation marks) in interviews, especially in consideration of journalistic integrity. Just the way the interview is transcribed and edited in itself makes me skeptical.
I think that's why "less than one percent" of their call volume is in relation to bugs. It's because MS insists that they're features. Just like the one in Word 97, 2000, and 2002 which "could permit a clever cracker to steal copies of files on your hard drive."
So this must mean that over 99% of their call volume is in regard to "features." Yeah, that's it!
It came from a tech satire website. The interview did not take place. You may now put down the pitchforks and torches...
If you just want to blindly start swinging because it's Bill Gates, then fine, do your swinging. But if you want to join the world of grownups, maybe it would be useful to think critically.
I would like to welcome you to Slashdot and let you know that grownups hang out elsewhere... any anti bill/MS statement is accepted without any thought.
One percent of $500 million means that just the phone calls of his bugs cost him $5 million per year to answer the phone. If I got $5 million of bug reports per year, I'd figure I had a problem.
Take a guess at the percentage of users who encounter bugs and realize that they are bugs. This might also be pretty low. Take a guess at the percentage of users who realize that they have come across a bug and bother to report it. This should also be very low, because (1) you are expecting to spend half of eternity on hold, (2) you are expecting that they aren't going to fix it just for you anyway, (3) you are expecting that some of their other hundreds of millions of users have already reported it, and (4) you know that the people who answer the phone are no fun to talk with and will just blame you like Gates does in this interview and you've had enough aggravation already.
With low percentages at each stage of the bug reporting process, and with some reasonable estimate of the dollar and time cost of each bug that smacks a user, we can extrapolate that the annual cost of Microsoft's bugs is greater than the combined GNP of half the member nations of the UN.
Speaking of the UN, don't bomb Iraq, just airdrop Windows ME disks and cubicles.
From article:
No! There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.
Then there would be no reason for:
this
or this
or this
or this
or this
So, Bill, let me ask you. Why does every one of your "released" products have an associated service pack?
-ted
Service Packs, not new versions, are how bug fixes are delivered. It is service packs that drive stability, quality improvements, bug fixes.
Gates is absolutely right - you NEVER buy a new version because of a fix you expect. If you do, you're psycho. You DO install Service Packs to get the fix. Have you noticed that Service Packs are free or very affordable? There's a reason - no one pays for bug fixes - it's the responsibility of the company to fix things that don't work.
This is like buying a car. If you want the thing to last, you buy the car that has been in production for at least 3 years. Why? Because the kinks have been worked out. Then when you buy it, you assume it works. If it doesn't, you liberally employ the warranty, because you paid for a working car. If someone were to insist you pay to fix your alternator a year after buying a new car, you'd laugh at them and promptly take them to court. Same story with software.
Install the service pack if you want stability, quality improvements, bug fixes.
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.
Did you ever try that? I did, and I can tell you that there just simply was not enough memory to run a BBS, a DOS shell and some applications. You could run a BBS and have a separate DOS shell running, but hardly any applications (I don't think edlin is an application). And what exactly can you do with a dos shell if you can't run any applications with it?
The machine I used for my experiments at that time was a 286 with 1 MB of memory.
It has to work - rfc1925
Hmmm... In 1991 Linus Torwalds announced :
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)
If you go back far enough, you'll always find someone saying something that was true then but isn't anymore.
Peder
The thing that most people don't seem to realize is that commercial software is about the costumer, the company behind the product will do what the customer wants to sell more products, but free (as in speach and beer) is about the code. It doesn't matter how many copies they give away, it's just about personal pride. So if you want stable software go with open source, but if you want all the features that Micro$oft thought would sell go with them.
Wherever you go, there you are!
Really. Why don't you do a little research, and find out A) when Visual Studio
For extra credit, 1) find out how long the new beta has been available, 2) how many problems it fixes, 3) how many times it has been plugged on the Microsoft support groups by Microsoft employees, 4) when their planned full release date is, 5) when the "patches and service packs" for the current version are scheduled to be made available (hint: answer (4) first), 6) what problems those will address, and finally, 7) just how much it will cost you to get those bug fixes today.
I'm serious, go find out. Answer all of those questions, and then tell me about the "patches and service packs" (LAMO!)
This is actually very close to accurate. The word "bug" is a big no-no when working support for MS.
Posting anonomously, just in case.
I hate Bill Gates and Microsoft as much as the next guy.
But dragging up an interview from 1995 is just cheap. I doubt much, if anything, he has to say then applies to today. After all, the internet wasn't even an issue at the time.
From PC Magazine, February 14, 2003
I used to work for a company that outsourced to Microsoft dealing with M$N. Our call volume was ridiculous. With so many callers reporting problems and wanting to cancel service, our job was to convince the customers in whatever way possible to have them stay. Some reps did it honestly while some did it dishonestly. Our time on the phone was limited to about 6 minutes. However,we had constant problems with the intranet due to their vbscript errors, we usually stayed on much much longer putting customers on hold. Anyways, point of the story is we had to act like Microsoft was God. They were infalliable despite their many errors. Basically, they'll do anything to gain the almighty greenback into their position. Best part of the job was giving away M$'s money to the customers. For those brief moments, I felt like Robin Hood. "Sir, have you heard about our new feature.. try another month...*whispering* call back on this date to cancel..*talking loud and fast* ok. great..and here's 2 months charged back on your credit card.. thanks for using M$N". I hated that job though.
As much as I dislike microsoft, this is not how I would like to think of our community (of non-ms slaves). At best this is a very unflattering translation from German, at worst it's just completely fabricated. I'd prefer to beat MS with a bit of integrity.
For something new, such as XP, you get unlimited support for setup calls, then after it is installed and working, you are allowed 2 free support issues before you have to pay. And if its to report a bug, then the call is free.
Server products OTOH usually have some pretty high fee's, probably due to the poor reasoning that only companies that make tons of cash are using the product...however there are contracts you can purchase that allow you a certain number of calls (in which 1 "call" = as many calls as it takes to get 1 certain issue resolved) which brings the cost of server support down quite a bit. But once again, if you call in to report a bug, you don't have to pay for the call.
I've worked support for many different companies, including MS (who outsources at least 90% of their support...providing tech support is a black hole as far as making money is concerned), and I've only once found the cause of the problem to be an actual "bug" (having to have a certain version of the JavaVM installed to install IE5). As soon as we (me) figured out the issue, a support article was written, submitted to the Knowledge Base, and was available to the rest of the techs and people who use the web within a matter of days.
Plus at this point, if you don't want to make a phone call, you can always submit a bug report thru the Help function...they usually get answered in a matter of hours...
There are options. MS might not be the most friendly corporate entity out there, but they do try to get things to work out ok (:
Yuma, AZ...You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.
Give me a break. Microsoft fully refunds your money if your call turns out to be a real bug. You are only charged if you call for technical support or for user error. The system actually works very well and I have had a lot of success in reporting bugs to Microsoft and actually getting them patched or worked around.
Of course it is still generally a lot easier to get a bug reported and fixed with an open source product, but that goes without saying.
It is not profitable to fix bugs...
If anything, bug fixes, service packs, and other ancilliary releases represent an expense for Microsoft -- as much a part of P.R. than anything: convincing people that they take quality seriously, and that the next release will be "better", and so worth buying.
Apparently, people believe this since the perception that newer releases are less buggy persists.
How much would you spend to have a bug fixed? $10? $100?, or more like the $2000 to $20000 it actually costs (once overhead is taken into account)? Probably not anywhere close to $2000. You might even think the software vendor has an obligation to fix the bug. Nope. Nada. You accepted the lack of a warrenty, remember? Enough people accept it that Microsoft does not have to provide one. Their software is good enough for enough people to keep them profitable. Tough noogies.
Of course, if you're capable of examining and correcting bugs, given the source code (and, sometimes, even if you don't have it, though that's generally a tough slog, reserved for the most stubborn of us), you might not have $2000, but you may have the skill to invest your time to solve the problem. Heck, if you're gonna find and fix it for yourself anyway, might as well share your fix for some egoboo. For those of us with those kind of skills, closed-source software is, indeed, a poor value proposition.
Richard Stallman has pointed out that free software will not put the maintenance programmer out of work, since not everyone has the skills to fix bugs in the code they use -- one can always subscribe to a software support service, and, for certain enterprise products such subscriptions are du regeur. With open source code (and I use the distinction because I'm focusing on the ecomonic attributes of same, and not the social philosophy of it being free, though it may very well be), it may be easier for the individual to hire a maintenance programmer. Someone who's business relies on bug-free code will surely do so, and I think many have realised the folly of tying themselves to the suppport promises of closed-source providers, like Microsoft -- the expression "...hook, line, and sinker" come to mind.
It is ironic that perhaps RMS's argument for the livelihood available for maintenance programmers is weakened by the popularity of the free software movement itself: so many programmers will provide fixes for free that only difficult bugs or esoteric modifications (with little market demand) will justify payment.
You could've hired me.
this interview is from 1995. Just imagine all of the dumb shit I said in 1995 (like "internet, schminternet"). Thank god nobody cares enough to drag it out and post it on slashdot.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
>>I've met a number of people whose computers lock up on a daily basis.
Sorry to say, but this sounds like anti-M$ FUD.
I am a developer at a company that produces sofware for Windows/Linux/OSX/Solaris. I typically spend part of my day on at least two of these platforms, but my primary desktop is Windows 2000. Some of our 'linux only' developers used to talk trash about BSOD's and daily lockups, so I entered into a wager with one of our linux developers regarding whose computer would have the longest uptime. So, we both rebooted our computer at the same time and the contest began. I was using Windows 98 and he was using Debian. After 6 months, we called the contest a draw when the boss came walking around with more memory for our computers (more important to him since he was used VMWare for his Windows stuff).
The only application that I have seen cause a BSOD was Netscape 4.7 on Windows 95, and the only lockups were back in the days of Windows 2.11 when the networking was done with DOS drivers or TSR's and the hardware would get stuck on blocking read/write calls. Since the OS was single tasking, if the hardware didn't perform an interupt, you were stuck. This was back in the days when Ungerman-Bass networking equipment ruled the world.
Have BSOD's occurred - sure they have. But the rate of BSOD's that I have seen over the years have been on par with the number of kernal core and seg faults that I have seen with Linux (going all the way back to Slackware ruled linux - back when Linux was unix and not full of all the bloat crap that it has today).
You notice how no one ever says "Windows locks up on me daily" or "I have to reboot daily", but people say "I know someone who has to reboot daily". Sort of like the fact that no one sees aligators in NYC sewers, but every NYC resident knows someone who claims to have seen these alligators.
"Microsoft has made computing accessible to a population who would otherwise not be able to use computers" - B. Kernigha