I work at Microsoft on Machine Feedback and Reliability amongst other things. I'd like to clear up some terminology on the news story in the NYT. Several persons here are making the assumption that "Crash" is the same as "Blue Screen" or "OS Crash". In fact, what was meant in the article when we the word "crash" was used was that some application on the OS crashed. The OS itself did not crash. Any kind of third party application can crash due to bad programming . Many times third party applications will crash exactly because we have closed off a problem. Sometimes, an inbox application will crash due to extensions. Sometimes there may even be an OS crash (and those are usually much fewer) due a third party driver.
Here, in the Windows Product team, we are deeply dedicated to making not just our operating system better but to find and help fix every third party developer's bugs. We even make crash data for third party developers available at a great web site (http://winqual.microsoft.com/ - which is currently being upgraded and will be available again soon).
The story here is that we have unprecedented focus on looking at the very problems that users have and are taking these problems and automatically filing bugs that are fixed by developers at Microsoft and by third party ISVs.
You too can take advantage of many of these mechanisms by signing up and taking ownership of your binaries on the site mentioned above.
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You are absolutely correct. That number was for crashes of all applications, not OS crashes. See my other posting.
I work at Microsoft on Machine Feedback and Reliability amongst other things. I'd like to clear up some terminology on the news story in the NYT. Several persons here are making the assumption that "Crash" is the same as "Blue Screen" or "OS Crash". In fact, what was meant in the article when we the word "crash" was used was that some application on the OS crashed. The OS itself did not crash. Any kind of third party application can crash due to bad programming . Many times third party applications will crash exactly because we have closed off a problem. Sometimes, an inbox application will crash due to extensions. Sometimes there may even be an OS crash (and those are usually much fewer) due a third party driver. Here, in the Windows Product team, we are deeply dedicated to making not just our operating system better but to find and help fix every third party developer's bugs. We even make crash data for third party developers available at a great web site (http://winqual.microsoft.com/ - which is currently being upgraded and will be available again soon). The story here is that we have unprecedented focus on looking at the very problems that users have and are taking these problems and automatically filing bugs that are fixed by developers at Microsoft and by third party ISVs. You too can take advantage of many of these mechanisms by signing up and taking ownership of your binaries on the site mentioned above.