How does a company produce a flawed piece of software but still remain in business?

Question

People just seem to accept that Microsoft Windows will crash at some point. If my brand new car kept crashing there would be hell to pay!

Answer 1

Totally agree! Then they make an upgrade to correct the mistakes but charge you for it - that's how they make their money.

Windows '95 was the only software with the least amount of glitches in it. Software released since seem to have more and more flaws in them whilst Microsoft's coffers swell to bursting from the poor consumer who puts up with the rubbish.

They know they have the monopoly and money to deal with any lawsuits that come their way. They went through a phase of targetting small companies who were dealing in 'grey' MS software and dragging out a court case until the smaller company went bankrupt as they could not compete against the billions MS have and yet we still buy their software!!!!!

Answer 2

Firstly, all software has flaws. Any program as large as Windows is going to have flaws. Second, Microsoft has to deal with a lot of scenarios. Unlike Apple, Microsoft doesn't control the hardware. It is hard to encompass all the different scenarios and machines Windows will be run on. Going along with that one, Microsoft also has to support backward compatibility. I can imagine how frustrating it must be to have people complaining that Vista doesn't run on 10 year old machines. Another example of that is the people who complained when Microsoft pulled support for Windows 2000. Maybe after 6 years you should think about upgrading.

But I don't want to sound like an fanboy. I mostly blame microsoft management for the status of Windows. It is things like their inability to cut off backward compatibility that is causing the problems we see today. Windows is rumored to be over 3 times longer then other OS and loaded with spagetti code. In fact there are still some remnants of DOS within Windows. What is really needed is an overhaul. Check all of the code, if it is bad, loaded with hacks or outdated, rewrite it. They could produce a good copy of windows but the management is too scared of the consequences.

Oh, and everyone romanticizes about the "good old days" when Windows was built on DOS. Snap out of it. Or get a disk and install it, after 5 minutes you will remember how bad, slow, and buggy it was. It was full of IRQ (remember those) and BSOD's (I haven't had one BSOD in 4 years). And much of the bad bad bad mistakes in windows (raw sockets, the registry, the start based UI happened in the late 90's). The best version of Windows was Windows 2000, which brings back up my point.

NT was a project that was built from scratch and was a very good OS. But then Microsoft management messed up again and instead of just building the stuff needed for a mainstream OS from scratch and building it off NT, they merged the absolutely horrible ME code with NT and made the best windows version ever, 2000. Since then they have tried to rewrite some code but they just aren't committed and the problems from ME continue to get worse and the code just keeps on getting older and adding more problems.

Answer 3

As today Microsoft have the upper hand but who knows what happens next week someone could have a better system then they will try to buy them out.

Answer 4

If it wasn't for the games I like to play, I'd go Linux.