RE: "thousands or tens of thousands of people are staring at pieces of metal they used to know as their computer."
Who are these people you refer to? Where was this reported? DId an "Uninstall" not fix the problem? Just looking for a citation and quantfication, not an argument.
Ultimately, the question is qualified risk, on both the part of the vendor and the consumer. Education is also the responsibility of both the vendor and the consumer.
When lots of disasters occur, I would expect that an appropriate response is a recall. At least warranty coverage. Do we have evidence that there are issues severe enough to qualify for a recall or for warranty-based fixes?
I personally like your automobile analogy. The car engine was exactly the image I was thinking of when I wrote my prior statement. We either need to change the marketing message or change the product to match the image.
Regarding restricted distribution, I expect that the OEMs already had Win98 for a few months, but are only now releasing patches.
Additionally, retail stores are a great source of business sales, not just home-user sales. Would you expect that one could sell operating systems to OEMs only and not to individuals without major complaints? How would your suggestions on restricting sales or adding an on-package warning generalize to, let's say, CompUSA sales of hard drives, or any item that requires physical installation and is not plug-and-play?
Finally, regarding Microsoft specifically, do you hold other companies to this same standard? When you say that this was bad for "consumers", which consumers are you referring to? All consumers, or a specific set of consumers whose descriptive characteristics can be described.
Thanks for the discussion, I personally appreciate it. |
