rockysmolin at bchacc.com
rockysmolin at bchacc.com
Fri May 21 21:02:12 CDT 2010
"If the cost of developing Windows tripled the cost to the consumer would be marginal almost to the point of imperceptible. " But not to MS. Plus the extra time it would take to perfect windowes represents a signifncant opportunity cost. "support of MS products and fixing Windows errors is a major business and just another revenue stream " Which means no incentive to perfect. Why spend big bucks to perfect Windows with he loss of time and revenue, and then give up the support costs. Finally, comparing a narrow well-defined application like the shuttle systems, it may not be fair to compare it to a general purpose system like Windows. How many third party downloads are they doing up there which might smoke out incompatibilities with their system. Rocky Original Message: ----------------- From: Jim Lawrence accessd at shaw.ca Date: Fri, 21 May 2010 09:21:40 -0700 To: dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Now why is not Windows written to this standard? " cost to the consumer would be marginal almost to the point of imperceptible." Not to MS. Plus there's the TIME it would take to perfect - there's a big opportunity I agree with much of what you say but there be more to it than that. First, unlike the shuttle craft software that runs on but a few systems, just Windows7 alone runs on 90,000,000 million computers... If the cost of developing Windows tripled the cost to the consumer would be marginal almost to the point of imperceptible. Second, support of MS products and fixing Windows errors is a major business and just another revenue stream and as long as the public will tolerate it, why change things. Third, being a buggy desktop, Windows (80 plus percent estimated on the desktop) may be tolerable, where a simple reboot can solve most problems but when it comes to servers MS has been doing itself no flavours. There is a reason why Microsoft has been unable to make major in roads with servers. (In 30 years it owns less than 7 percent, of that market, according to a 2009 survey). The reliability or perceived reliability just is not there. Servers, like the space shuttle, are mission critical. The question of course is; can a reliable desktop type product be made? OpenBSD a flavour of Linux/Unix brags that they have had fewer than a dozen real bugs in about 15-20 years... BSD is now used as the core to the new Macs. Ubuntu/Debian Linux product states it has less than 10 percent the amount of bugs that MS does and fixes them in a quarter of the time. All of this is of course part fact and part fiction as Microsoft counters with it own nearly unbelievable statistics. Jim -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of rockysmolin at bchacc.com Sent: Friday, May 21, 2010 8:14 AM To: dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Now why is not Windows written to this standard? Well there's an obvious answer to your question - I think. The cost of an error in the space shuttle is death. The testing has to be perfect. The cost of errors in Windows is lost hair, mostly. It's not a mission critical application (for users who do their disk images and/or backups regularly). The 80/20 rule says you're going to spend a huge amount of money uncovering those last few bugs. Microsoft COULD make Windows error free but it wold probably cost $3,000 a copy in stead of $300. You've worked with government contracts enough to know the routine. ROcky Original Message: ----------------- From: Jim Lawrence accessd at shaw.ca Date: Thu, 20 May 2010 19:07:21 -0700 To: dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com Subject: [dba-Tech] Now why is not Windows written to this standard? I received this link and it made me ask the question...Why can not Windows be written with the same confidence? Does Windows and virtually all other software for that matter have to have thousands of errors? Is it because thousands of jobs depend on those errors? if MS could even come close to matching a near perfect Desktop, would they have any concerns from competition? Is there not checking software that if given time and the right testing scenarios can virtually uncover any bug? But what do I know? http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html?page=0,0 Jim _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web LIVE - Free email based on MicrosoftR Exchange technology - http://link.mail2web.com/LIVE _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web LIVE – Free email based on Microsoft® Exchange technology - http://link.mail2web.com/LIVE