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Date:      Tue, 2 Apr 2002 14:57:47 -0600
From:      Mike Meyer <mwm-dated-1018213068.da8dcb@mired.org>
To:        "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@atkielski.com>
Cc:        "Rahul Siddharthan" <rsidd@online.fr>, "Terry Lambert" <tlambert2@mindspring.com>, <chat@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Anti-Unix Site Runs Unix
Message-ID:  <15530.6987.977637.574551@guru.mired.org>
In-Reply-To: <009301c1da83$9fa73170$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
References:  <20020402113404.A52321@lpt.ens.fr> <3CA9854E.A4D86CC4@mindspring.com> <20020402123254.H49279@lpt.ens.fr> <009301c1da83$9fa73170$0a00000a@atkielski.com>

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In <009301c1da83$9fa73170$0a00000a@atkielski.com>, Anthony Atkielski <anthony@atkielski.com> typed:
> > The real question is, do they fix it
> > for you so that it doesn't crash?
> Yes.  That's what real support--the kind that corporate users are willing to
> pay for--provides.  It's expensive, but eventually problems usually do get
> resolved.  I think this paradigm is a sign of a serious problem in the IT
> industry (why should you have to pay to get a product you buy to work?), but
> nobody seems to be doing anything to change it.

There's no money in that, so why should anyone do it? In particular,
in an industry dominated by a company that gained that position by
shipping buggy products and making money on upgrades, there's no
incentive to do anything else.

The end result is that the only people interested in shipping a
bug-free product - as opposed to one that they can get people to buy -
are the people who aren't trying to sell the product.

> > If they do that, why does it continue to
> > crash for everyone else, and if they don't,
> > what are you paying them for?
> It _doesn't_ crash for everyone else.  Most people using successful software
> products never see any crashes at all--that's what makes the products
> successful.  Any company selling products that crashed for "everyone" would
> be out of business in a heartbeat.

No, what makes a product successful is selling lots of copies. Being
crashfree doesn't do that *nearly* as well as convincing people that
there isn't an alternative.

> > ... or nobody would be using FreeBSD, we'd all
> > be using Microsoft products.
> That is very nearly the truth today.  Virtually no one runs FreeBSD on the
> desktop; virtually everyone runs Microsoft products.  The only significant
> minority is the Mac community, and it is still twenty times smaller than the
> Windows majority.

Last time I checked, Linux had more desktops than the Mac. Still a
small minority, though.

	<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.

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