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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."
Bill is becoming the world expert on increasing revenue without providing value to his customers.
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.
If that's not a conservative estimate, call me a liberal.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
I haven't read the article, but I assume that the Poster meant to type 95%. Its OK, we all make mistakes.
The other 95% of all Windows installations have the reporting feature disabled...
>>Microsoft is looking at charging for some of
>>its software updates that it now distributes
>>for free."
Buffer ovverflow - $15
Firewall Fix - $45
Service Pack 3 - $300
Knowing that no matter how much patches come out, Linux will be more secure - Pricess
doesn't that give MS an incentive to leave bugs in?
Microsoft charging for Windows Updates is analogous to Ford charging their customers extra for basic safety features which should be free in the first place! What if Ford told you that there was a fatal flaw in your seatbelt system that could allow you to be thrown from the car in a crash, and that the problem was a result of poor engineering on their behalf, and that you had to pay out of your own pocket to fix it! If that happened the government would surely intervene and force Ford to provide the fix for free. I can't belive that Microsoft has the gall to even consider charging us to fix the holes in their systems that are there because of their own fault!
It doesn't matter what "causes" the crash. The OS should be essentially crashproof. That's what an OS was for, and it was why Apple got such a drubbing before OS X finally came out (twelve years later).
And of course there are plenty of people who choose not to send the crash report to MS, or, even more likely, do not (*gasp*) have always-on-connections and cannot send the report to MS. The vast majority, for all we know, go unreported. This is, after all, hardly an accurate means of statistical sampling.
Nothing to push the masses to Linux/Mac like charging for updates & bugfixes.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
It's not a crash. It's...it's... a programmed REST BREAK.
that according to error reporting software in windows
yeah, but how many people actually use the "report this error to microsoft" feature?. I know everytime I get a crash, I opt to not send the report, and I know i'm not the only one that does this. Also, the only time this method for reporting error is used at all is when customers are on broadband connections, or in office networks (can you imagine wating for your modem to dial to report an error or a crash?), and what about those times when the crash is so bad your entire system needs to be restarted?. From what I can tell, this error reporting software only sends error reports regarding programs that crash, not the OS itself. So... 5% of windows users, who are on persistent connections, who use the error reporting software, who had a crash on an application that doesn't freeze the entire system, are crashing at least 2 times a day... The real number has to be much higher that that.
-K
-K
are still stuck at the "Windows was not shut down properly" screen.
But on to my topic,
Now how many people crash ONCE a day??? It seems odd that he would pick just twice a day to report, what would have looked more impressive would have been Bill saying "Only 5% of our users crash once or more using all of our operating systems."
I know as all you do it would have been a much more staggering figure since just about any Windows PC I see at work crashes once a day, so I can see why he didnt say it.
Glad my linux and OSX boxes crash on an average of once every 6 or 7 months or so.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I think Dilbert had one (rumored to be based on a true story) where the company decided to offer a bounty for every bug fixed. As usual, Wally decided to "write himself a minivan." I can already see bugs been inserted proactively by employees to boost their stock option value...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
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.
"Knowing that no matter how much patches come out, Linux will be more secure - Pricess"
Price[le]ss
And that sums up the problem with Linux at this stage of the game: no matter what you want it to do, there seems to be one little piece that isn't there yet.
And those Macs are running on adverage 24 hours a day whereas the PC's are shutdown every night since they seem to crash less than when we did leave them on everyday.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
wait just a gul darn minute ...
I was under the impression the error reporting tool didn't send any personally identifiable info back to MS. How, exactly, is he figuring out the frequency with which individual machines crash?
I don't care what kind of application you're using, the job of the OS is to protect the hardware from access by individual programs, and to protect programs from each other. No app should EVER be able to crash an OS, game or not.
Device drivers are another matter, but still one within MS's control in a way; MS is the one that created the culture of every device having its own drivers, instead of the linux way where drivers are included in the kernel distribution and are written for devices generically. For instance, if you download the newest kernel, there's a driver in there for the RTL3019 NIC chipset. So all cards based on this chipset (which is a lot; it's a common low-cost chipset for NICs) use the same driver, unlike the Windows world where all those cards are about the same from a hardware POV, but the drivers are all different, and some may be better than others. Also, in Linux, the drivers are open-source just like the rest of the kernel, so people are able to file bug reports against them, debug them themselves, etc., unlike the Windows world where each driver is a little black box from the manufacturer, and may not even be supported anymore (common when the manuf. goes out of business). Admittedly, MS has finally, after all these years, started to recognize this problem, and is now trying this "signed" driver scheme to improve their situation.
Think about it. 100 million Windows users. 5% is 5 mil. At 2 crashes a day, that's 10 million transactions. Daily. Not even counting all the less frequent crashers.
.5 day to measure it), the throughput is 500 gigabytes per day, averaging 46.4 Megabits/second.
That's 416,666 transactions per hour, 6944 transactions per minute, or about 116 transactions per second.
If each report is 50K (don't have an exact figure, and I don't want to wait the
*That's* the kind of data processing system I'd like to buy!
-m
--- Learn XForms today: http://xformsinstitute.com
The problems with Windows are as follows:
#1. The core OS was not sufficiently protected from being "upgraded" by any application that was installed. Microsoft was the biggest offender with Office.
#2. The binary registry has all of the information for everything, users, applications, hardware, security, etc stored in it. If something goes wrong it is a major pain to fix it.
#3. The uninstall feature of Windows does not clear out everything. If I do install a buggy driver for a scanner and I want to remove it so it doesn't affect my system anymore, uninstalling does NOT always clean it out.
That is why, over time, Windows installations become less stable. Crap gets stuck in the registry and drivers get stuck in the OS directories and bad things start happening.
And don't give me any crap about that being the fault of the user. The OS should be able to control itself. Look at Debian's uninstall feature. Debian even has multiple levels of uninstall.
The problems with Windows are because of decisions Microsoft made. Not because of end-users.
Hey I've been programming for 20 years and you're quite correct -- programming is hard. But I must disagree with your assertion that just because it's hard means that bugs aren't mistakes. They ARE mistakes. And yes, it's generally somebody's fault when they occur. Level of difficulty doesn't let you off the hook here ... sorry.