🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Aug24.103534.26466@yuma.ACNS.ColoState.EDU>, peters@CS.ColoState.EDU (eric peters) writes:

>reason)....  but why is everyone so opposed to Microsoft?


For a supposedly high-end company, Microsoft puts out remarkably low-quality
products for a remakably high price tag... but this is not a reason to hate
them, just to not purchase their products.

I learned to hate them through a different method:

  I work as a programmer/consultant/sysadmin for a research lab here, and am
in charge of 5 micros running MS-DOS, a Sun workstation, and about a zillion
obscure or custom made pieces of hardware.

  During a project a while ago, I came up with a question I needed answered
very badly -- it was a very complicated and rather difficult problem for me,
but the info to solve it would require maybe 10 minutes to look up for MS.

  The question was regarding how DOS dealt with oversized hard disks in
certain situations. First off, I did a thorough search through my collection
of information, then scoured the library, computing center, and bookstore.
No dice. So I called MS. After wading through their phone maze, I came
up upon a beauty of a recording informing me that I can obtain support
by either:

	a) Calling an 800 number and having a flat rate billed to my
	   credit card, or

	b) Calling a 900 number and getting billed per minute.

  Well, I do not have credit cards (to minimize my paranoia about computer
records on me), so the first choice was out. The University phone system
here does not allow 900 numbers to be called, so the second choice was
out, too. I was left out in the cold.

  Well, I was pretty pissed, but understood that they probably get a million
calls a day asking them which side of a disk faces up, so they want to recoup
the loss.  Then I got to thinking:

  MS-DOS is *the* biggest selling piece of software ever. This OS _is_
what made Microsoft what it is today, and it is still very lucrative. Yet,
they choose to support it inadequately.  I mean, they could avert lots
of stupid calls in other ways, saving everyone time and money, but they
obviously don't care.

  On top of that, MS wants to dump DOS.  They have newer things they want
to push, and DOS doesn't fit in anymore...

  Anyway, I realized that there is no way I can trust a company that cannot
support their main cash cow any better than this. When people ask for
my official opinions and recomendations, I always recomend against MS
products, because I know that they will eventually get bored with it and
junk it at best in the same manner they did with DOS.

  Of course, it's no loss, as for any given MS product I can think of, there
is at least one (usually more) better, more solid, and cheaper product that
does the same work, made by another company...


-- 
John Martin                                        johnm@cajal.uoregon.edu
Institute of Neuroscience,   University of Oregon,    Eugene, OR,    97402