Lynn -
MSFT provides several ways for product to get to customers. If you buy the products at retail, you pay a premium over what any manufacturer pays - and that in part pays for MSFT technical support. Big OEMs get the lowest prices - and as a part of that deal, they are responsible for all technical support at "level 1" (taking the first call) and "level 2" (making sure the customer read the manual). "Level 3" (a real problem) gets MSFT support - but through the OEM... i.e. the OEM takes ownership of the "case" but MSFT actually solves the problem. Smaller manufacturers pay more than the big OEMs but in return get MSFT support at "level 2" since they are less likely to have even that level of capability. The smallest, VARs who sell only a few systems a week, get only a small discount off of retail, but do not have to do any support. This has been the situation since the earliest days of MSFT.
Starting with Win2K, MSFT is introducing new support models, particularly for Enterprise customers. Under this model customers get "co-branded" services and can call either MSFT or the OEM - and MSFT and the OEM share case management, so that no matter who gets called first or who actually has the problem, the customer gets serviced. Even if the customer calls both MSFT and the OEM, the case is supposed to get matched up.
There is also a program called "platinum" which has been in place for many years, for the larger customers. Under this program, the customer always calls MSFT first no matter what the problem is, and the situation works in reverse of the standard case - if it goes beyond "level 2" and is not a MSFT problem, MSFT still takes ownership but internally works the issues with the OEM. That team is also the ones who get called for the "pay as you go" service like QS diescribed, and they are relly pretty good.
I agree 100% about the Windows 9X products - the whole OS is built on a design that did not benefit from any computer science... no pre-emptive multi-tasking, a swap memory model out of the 1950s, memory management only in the weak sense of allocating physical memory on request, no protection for the OS or hardware. That product was built directly on the heritage of the original DOS, which was after all originally hacked out for 16 bit address space machines and was designed to do one simple thing at a time.
NT, on the other hand, is really a descendant of DEC's RSX-11M and VAX VMS, which were two of the best operating systems ever created ... the reasons for the lower reliability of NT are, as Paul pointed out, more a result of the fact that MSFT can not control the configuration that the OS runs on, which can include any damn fool combination of hardware that someone can put together, than any design weakness. Solaris for X86 has pretty much the same problems... |
