I think it's quite simple. Microsoft burned the bridges behind on driver development, which required drivers to be restructured or completely rewritten. They must have done an enormous effort on making the driver reach the current level. What bothers me is that NT and Windows 2000 isn't compatible regarding drivers. It seems that every time a new version of Windows pops out, there is a new driver model.
What really bad about this driver shift, is, that people are not leaving Windows 95, so right now we have an enormous amount of platforms to support. Every version of Windows that comes out has it's tiny bugs here and there, and most of them are undocumented. This doesn't get easier, now that the Windows platforms that we have to support has fragmented into:
Windows 95
Windows 95 OEM SR 2.x
Windows 98
Windows 98 SE
Windows NT 3.51 (only on servers)
Windows NT 4.0 SP 3,4,6a
Windows 2000 (not a requirement from our customers, yet)
And since we are in Europe, we have localized versions with different bugs (and more bugs) than the U.S. versions. Since U.S. versions are also used heavily, the Windows platform looks like a big mess, and testing applications and installation programs on all these platforms is really costly. This is also the reason why we like to provide terminal server solutions - then there is only one platform to install onto, and much less platform testing.
Today I was in contact with the danish postal service. They were not hit hard by the "I love you" bug, since they use Microsoft Mail. Remember? The predecessor of Exchange? It still runs in this 26.000 employee organisation. |
