[Am-info] query about MS "Innovations"

[John Poltorak]

On Fri, Mar 29, 2002 at 10:11:52AM -0500, Geoffrey wrote:
> John Poltorak wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 29, 2002 at 09:43:11AM -0500, Sujal Shah wrote:
> > 
> >>On Fri, 2002-03-29 at 09:39, Geoffrey wrote:
> >>
> >>>Sujal Shah wrote:

> >>Oh, that reminds me.  Another MSFT innovation is getting someone else to
> >>burden the cost of supporting your product.  I can't believe that the
> >>OEMs are happy being front line support for essentially a whole lot of
> >>MSFT software (since not much non-MSFT software actually makes it onto
> >>new PCs anymore).
> >>
> > 
> > I think you have hit the nail on the head. This is Microsoft's greatest 
> > innovation, outsourcing testing of their software to unsuspecting third 
> > parties. It must cut down development costs to a small fraction of the 
> > true value.
> 
> Actually these are two different issues, but both are valid.  M$ does 
> outsource their support of their products (at no cost to themselves that 
> I know of) to the OEMs.  This is why I don't buy t-shirts that advertise 
> for a particular company.  I'm not going to pay to be someone's free 
> advertisement.
> 
> AND they also outsource a lot of their testing by giving REAL users beta 
> software.  

They actually charge people to use their beta software!

> Have you ever seen a version of windows that wasn't patched 
> very shortly after it went out?  Why?  Because some unsuspecting user 
> found a bug M$ did not.


Very often these bugs do not materialise until the product is released.

Although products are often released with tons of known problems...

ISTR Windows 2000 had 64,000 known bugs when it was released.

Then there are PC manufacturers who do stupid things like pre-install 
pre-releae versions of Windows as a specific selling point. I don't recall 
who it was exactly, but I remember some manufacturer including early 
copies of WinME (?) before it was officially released to manufacturing.
This sort of thing is negligent IMV, as the poor unsuspecting punter who 
bought it would not realise he was being used as a guinea pig.


> -- 
> Until later: Geoffrey		esoteric@3times25.net


-- 
John