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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: miraje who wrote (34604)	11/22/1999 4:20:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 74651

What, James? I have a thing for this old novel, and you don't? I hear the prose is pretty turgid, but I haven't read it myself. On the dreaded "harm to consumer" issue, I think the class action stuff is barking up the wrong tree. Walter Mossberg had it figured out in the WSJ, 9/30/99. Dear Diary: I'm Tired Of the Way Windows Crashes and Freezes! 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. In almost every case, I was running multiple programs when the problems occurred. But this wasn't an unfair test: Microsoft touts Windows as being able to handle such multitasking. And all of the programs I was using are well-known. They included Lotus Organizer, America Online, Netscape Navigator, MusicMatch Jukebox (a digital music player) and Microsoft's own Word, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express e-mail program. That the kind of skyscrapers John Galt built? Cheers, Dan.