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...

Comments

I hate to defend but...

[shylock0]

Well, he does have a point. Microsoft has never released a new version of software solely to fix bugs, which is what the article talks about. They release service packs for that, and they tend to work.

As a side issue, I work with Microsoft (yes, and Linux, and Apple) software almost every day; and I work with technical people who debug on those three platforms. Generally speaking, the bugs are rarely with the Microsoft software (and, as flameproofing, Linux tends to be pretty un-buggy as well). The bugs tend to be with non-Microsoft software running on the Microsoft platform. I have a laptop that runs Windows 2000, MS Word, IE 5, and a pretty plain-vanilla printer driver. It runs nothing else, and I always run it in a fairly protected mode. It works fine. I've never encountered a bug, or a bluescreen, or a crash (which I can't say for my other boxen, Linux or Windows, which have been stressed).

Granted, there may be bugs in other software, or libraries, or DLLs, or any other system components, which cause those software to fail -- but I've found precious little in terms of bugs in the base software put out by MS. They do a fairly good job at that, for all the other things they can't do right...

Slashdot's new tagline

[nmg196]

Ancient News For Nerds. Stuff That Doesn't Matter Anymore.

That's from fscking 1995! Slashdot is going severely downhill recently with it's quality of article selection. That article doesn't even look real.

Oh well, maybe when it gets reposted later today I'll be in a better mood to read it.

Nick...

partly correct

[A Gremlin In Kremlin]

Have you never heard people who are novice computer users, or even less, say things like "yeah word didn't do what I wanted it to do, it's a bug you know" or "yeah my Windows Me crashes all the time, it's because of Bill Gates and his buggy software. His software is full of bugs".

When in reality, these computer users know nearly nothing about computers. They know how to surf the net and tell people about "things they've heard" and so on. It's really annoying.

Sure, Word has bugs. Windows Me has bugs. What about the users? Have they ever considered the possibility that they don't know everything about Word? Have they ever considered the possibility that they are using IE on lowest security level, accepting all sorts of scripts and downloads and spyware? Have they considered the possibility that they saw some cool register hack in a beginner's computer magazine, tried it and it didn't work well?

Mind you, some computer users, when asked what operating system they have, say things like "uhmmm, Windows 97? No, wait... Word 98?" They really are in no position to talk about what is a bug and what is not.