Feb 6th, 2002







                








Popular does not always mean
 best.







              







            


























        







      






So why do we put up with it? Many years ago I saw how people's
 biases colored decisions. In August of 1999 Fred Moody wrote
 an article on the
 Productivity puzzle, in it he explained that Windows cost
 the USA $10-15 billion a year in lost productivity, but then
  I could have told him that in
 1988. But in late September of 1999 finally someone who has
 quite a following wrote a scathing article, I'll reprint some
 of it below, but you can click
 to the full article if you wish.

 (Note in January of 2001 I ran into Mr 
Mossberg at MacWorld 2001 in SF, he told me he is hoping to get an archive of his articles online soon, so review his site, and perhaps ask when?)


















        







          







            






  




















































I'm Tired of the Way







Windows Freezes!





















































By WALTER S. MOSSBERG (mossberg@wsj.com




































































Personal Technology Column,
 Wall Street Journal, September 30, 1999





















THE OTHER DAY, I was
 sitting in my office when it happened: the dreaded Microsoft
            Windows Blue Screen of Death. I wasn't doing anything special,  just trying to print a document from Microsoft Word 97 running on a new, powerful Hewlett-Packard Pavilion PC.













But suddenly, the screen turned entirely blue, and this message appeared: WINDOWS. A fatal exception
 0D has occurred at 0028:C000B25A in VXD VMM (01) + 0000A25A.
            The current application will be terminated.













I had to reboot the PC, start up Word again and then call up the document before I could print.













Irritating as this incident was, it wasn't unusual. In fact, it was just one of 23 incidents
  I recorded over a seven-day period in which six different Windows PCs I was using either crashed, froze or exhibited other unexpected or puzzling behavior. The problems ranged from unreadable file formats in e-mail to complete failures of the PC. Eleven of the
 23 incidents were so bad they required me to stop working and reboot the PC, a process that took up to four minutes, even on a very fast, very new Dell computer.













I decided to keep a detailed diary of my life with Windows fora week -- at home, in the office and on the road -- because I
 think all of us tend to overlook a lot of these glitches as normal with a PC. But they shouldn't be viewed as normal. They constitute
            defective behavior, pure and simple, the kind of behavior we'd never take for granted in other kinds of products.




























More of the article from
 Mr. Mossberg can be found a copy of the  the
 WSJ site  via the way back machine}








        







      

















On Oct 7th 1999 Mr. Mossberg printed some of the 500 letters he found in his mail box. I sent him one
 but he didn't print it. But I did notice that he didn't print
 any letters from programmers. Did you write a letter too?














































































































From: "John M McIntosh" 
Subject: Windows freezes! 
To: mossberg@wsj.com 

Until you/we/the public convinces a generation of programmers/engineers that
software needs to be fault tolerant, self healing, self repairing and simplistic 
we'll continue to face problems like you've experienced. As an consultant 
my objective is to write software that I won't ever be phoned for at 3:00AM 
to do support on. This is HARD to do, it requires much thought, expertise 
and training. Is this taught today? When I attended university 20 years 
ago things in the computer science labs were quite different, 
I've not gone back to see if this objective is on the table for the upcoming 
programmers. Of course the vendors make you pay to phone at 3:00AM. 
Strange how did we allow that? Where is their incentive to fix things then, 
when problem reporting is viewed as a profit center. 

For the last few years I worked on a project that had the objective of 
having the software run forever (or at least a few years non-stop) 
This was very difficult to grasp and required extensive retrained 
for some individuals. I'm sorry to say most consumer software is written 
without this objective in mind. 

Alas function/features/flash win out over stability everytime. 
As a Linux Star office user mentioned to me, 
"WOW, I can print a document before saving it" 
Yes imaging that... He doesn't fear the machine will crash during the 
printing of the document. 

-- 
=========================================================================== 
John M. McIntosh   
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
=========================================================================== 
Custom Macintosh programming & various Smalltalk dialects 
PGP Key: DSS/Diff/46FC3BE6 
Fingerprint=B22F 7D67 92B7 5D52 72D7 E94A EE69 2D21 46FC 3BE6 
===========================================================================