Gates Provides Windows Crash Statistic

cybercuzco writes "In an otherwise innocuous article at they NYT (FRRYYY) Bill Gates says that according to error reporting software in windows, 5% of all windows installations crash two or more times every day. Gates goes on to state that Microsoft is looking at charging for some of its software updates that it now distributes for free."

Comments

skewed statistics.

[vanadium4761]

The 5% number is just skewed heavily by the fact that any poorly written app that crashes is counted. Whenever an app crashes the windows error reporting system fires off a log to microsoft regarding the crash. I bet 90%+ of these crashes have nothing to do with windows.

Re:skewed statistics.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, No.

The statistic is highly scewed because most people don't send the crash report to Microsoft.

Re:skewed statistics.

[supremebob]

Actually, the error reporter service is smart enough to handle BSOD's. Once the system reboots, the error reporter notifies the user of the user of the problem (Which is stupid, because most people have a clue that there is a problems if their system suddenly reboots itself!), and gives them an option to send part of the core dump to Microsoft.

I've found the feature to be really annoying while you're trying to debug the problem, however, so I usually turn it off.

Re:skewed statistics.

[Jeremiah Blatz]

homer_ca writes:
I think the Windows error reporting service can only handle application errors and non-fatal system errors. If there was a BSOD or a hard freeze, the service wouldn't be running any more to report the crash, although theoretically it's possible for the service to check for a BSOD crash dump file and send a report after rebooting.

That is exactly what ti does. My girlfriend's laptop (XP Home) had a defective heat sink, so the vid card was overheating and crashing Windows. After it came back up, it sent off an error report to MS. (BTW, free repair, compaq paid Airborne Express shipping both ways, and had online maintenance tracking. Not too shabby.)

Re:skewed statistics.

[Doug Neal]

You will get one after a BSOD (or as they are known in NT/XP a "stop" error). On the next reboot it says "the system has recovered from a serious error", gives a few cursory details about it, and prompts you to send an error report.

DIRECT LINK! (comments)

[calebb]

HERE IS THE DIRECT LINK : (Doesn't require you to log in!) Thank you, Google News!

My favorite part: Last week, Microsoft raised its revenue forecast for fiscal 2004 by about $1 billion. At the same time the company also said it had no plans to spend any of its $49 billion cash on major acquisitions or increase dividends, despite recent rumors.

Now, If I'm reading this article correctly, they are indirectly affecting their positive cashflow 'problem' by increasing R&D. The article says that Microsoft expects revenue to increase 6-9% (of total revenue) in 2004; They are going to spend 8% more on R&D (8% more than R&D expenses in 2003)... So this looks like one way that Microsoft is going to slow down their positive cashflow. I can't see anything bad coming from Microsoft spending more on R This should be beneficial to end-users as long as MS doesn't spend all this additional research money finding better ways to make it difficult to pirate Windows.

We see a slightly higher incidence

[Archfeld]

of mysterious windows crash during system build, BEFORE there are any apps to mess it up. I've heard 10% but never seen that high, more like 8% from my view, and I've built 1000's of pc's and servers, and more using our new image process, so these are similar models, with standard equipment that for some strange reason get a variety of errors during the build process. 99% of those go along there merry after a reboot, and the remaining 1% is almost ALWAYS disk or memory errors.

Re:Cash for updates?

[sharlskdy]

Does this mean we're ever going to see Windows XP Service pack 2? Seriously, is it my memory playing tricks on me, or did or did not Microsoft promise (hah!) to release service packs every six months? SP1 was released Sept 9, 2002. Sp1A was released Feb 3, 2003, with the only acknowledged change being that they ripped out Java.

Oct 25, 2001 - Windows XP ships
Sept 9, 2002 - SP1 ships (10.5 months, or 4.5 months late)
Sept ?, 2003 - SP2 ships (12 months, or 6 months late) Check out Mr. Allchin's comments.

And, according to this link there are almost 300 issues addressed in this long-overdue patch.

What exactly are they going to charge for? Fixes, or enhancements? Apple charges for their regular updates - OSX 10.1, OSX 10.2, OSX 10.3, but they are also ENHANCING the product significantly with every release. Is this something MS intends to do, because I certainly don't mind paying for updates to the software as long as it actually ENHANCES things. I'll be pretty ticked off if I have to pay for FIXES.

Major versus minor updates

[LionMage]

Nice flamebait.

Each time a major OS release comes out of Apple, they charge for it, yes. So does everyone else. Microsoft does it. SuSE does it. Don't let the version numbering for Mac OS X fool ya, 10.2 was a major upgrade over 10.1, which was a major upgrade compared to 10.0.

However, Apple doesn't charge for minor point releases. They're up to 10.2.6 right now in OS X, so you can see there have been several point releases since 10.2 was released, plus a smattering of security updates and individual application updates. Those are all free.

If Microsoft really does start charging for service packs, as the parent article for this thread suggests, their customers are going to revolt. From the Microsoft standpoint, they need a new revenue stream, and they want a way to subsidize the ongoing effort of improving products already in the market (like Windows 2000 Professional, since many users refuse to upgrade to XP).

I'm willing to pay for a major new OS release once every year or two, if the new features are compelling enough and my hardware can support it. But I'm not willing to pay for the vendor's bug-fixing efforts and minor feature fixes/additions.

Re:Cash for updates?

[dadragon]

Apple doesn't charge for "point upgrades". OS X 10.2.[1,2,3,4,5,6,7] were free. So what if you had to pay for OS X 10.2? Microsoft made you pay twice for NT 5. Win2K is NT 5.0, XP is NT 5.1. Same difference.