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

To: david_si who wrote (46671)	6/14/2000 4:10:00 PM
From: cheryl williamson	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74651

There are innumerable, documented cases of failures in Windows 9x. The consumer experience using these products includes putting up with bugs that cause system crashes, sometimes requiring daily rebooting and re-entering lost data. If you dispute that that is the case, you are not living in the real world. It's common knowledge that for lots of reasons Windows blows up on a regular basis. Let's say this is 1985 and you live in East Germany. You buy a Yugo and the alternator fails once every 2-3 months and it needs replacing. Since this is East Germany, you have no choice but to buy a defective product. If cars couldn't be made with reliable alternators that would be one thing, but the fact is it's done all the time in the West. It's just that you can't buy one of those cars, so you put up with your piece of sh** Yugo. If no one knew how to write a reliable O/S, you could make the argument that the consumer wasn't really harmed, it's just that the technology isn't there yet. However, that is NOT the case. Reliable O/S's exist all over the place, and many of them are free of charge. You have to say that the consumer was harmed because they had to use MS-DOS to get appls (usually from M$FT) to run on the PC. You could argue that people don't have to buy PC's (or any other kind of computing equipment), which is true. In that case they aren't harmed at all by M$FT's actions. However, if they DO buy a desktop computer, you could say that the consumer deserves the best O/S for the cheapest price. However, M$FT has seen fit, up until the DOJ lawsuit, to make sure that that "best O/S" isn't available from the major resales channels. True, you could build your own PC or buy a Dell and clobber MS-DOS, but that's like saying that you could re-design the Yugo's electrical system to insure the alternator didn't fail. That notion is not protection for the consumer. A consumer should be able to buy a reliable desktop off-the-shelf for a fair price. Since that is not the case with IBM-spec PC's, the consumer has been harmed. Back to the auto-analogy: It's easy to say that all manufactured autos have "bugs", but some have more "bugs" than others. Furthermore, the ones that perform poorly on crash tests (like the one Ford made in the 70's) are yanked. The very fact that Windows has NO security, and that M$FT knew there was no security, and they advertised the use of Windows as internet-friendly, should make them a prime candidate for a product-liability lawsuit. 45,000 viruses infecting Windows over the last 12 years is a pretty good indicator of poor product quality, wouldn't you say David???