The Cost of Bug Fixes

Well, I try to avoid posting MS stories unless they're kinda large, but about 50 people have submitted a CNet story that proclaims that MS might be charging as much as $89 for a Service Patch to Windows 98. I guess I'd try to come up with an appropriately witty comment, but I'm at a loss for words here. Update: 04/07 03:27 by CT : apparently Cnet is screwed up a bit here, and CNN has a more accurate story. Read it.

Comments

Its a free country...

[Cassius]

You're free to be as stupid as you want to be.

Really. If Microsoft can get people to fall for it, then why not?

Honestly folks, every piece of software is a fix, upgrade, or amendment to something that has come before, so I don't really see a logical reason why a pricetag can't be put on the upgrade.

There were no claims that the original piece of software was defect free, and no one is claiming that users must purchase the upgrade.

I fervently disagree that the government must "do" something about this as other knee-jerk responses above have stated. Software vendors do this all the time. Database vendors, for example, typically roll out .x versions of software that mainly contain fixes, and charge for it.

This really isn't that abnormal.

Long Time Coming...

[pspeed]

Whereas it wasn't as obvious with Windows 4.1^H^H^H98, it is now pretty obvious here where their pricing model is going. To some of us this comes as no big surprise because we've been saying it all along. To others of us we don't care anyway because we never paid for an MS OS anyway. (And no, I'm not referring to pirating.) This is bound to surprise at least a few MS advocates in the world.

I just have to wonder if their cockiness will eventually be their downfall or will it just continue to work in their favor because they are who they are.

Conspiracy theorists will of course say that this is just an excuse to obtain peoples' personal information since it looks like Win 98.1 can only be bought through their web site. This means that they will be able to associate your name, address, and credit card number to your system GUID. Theoretically, they could also use this information to build a huge database of any web sites you've visited that use Link Exchange (since they own that too). Is MS going to become the largest marketer of personal data?

Realists know that this probably isn't going to happen. An NT server could never handle the data load we are talking about. I seriously doubt that MS would actually pay Sun Microsystems money for one of their huge data mining machines. Imagining the internal psychological struggle that Bill must be going through on that one is sort of funny.

Anyway, I don't want this to turn into a Jon Katz article so I'll stop now while I'm ahead.

-Paul (pspeed@progeeks.com)