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

To: dybdahl who wrote (63228)	11/21/2001 6:46:20 PM
From: Dave	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Lars, sorry I was unclear. Let me try to clarify: PlayStations games are essentially software apps, of course. These apps are very stable because software developers (game writers) target each app for a specific version of the hardware (because there's really just one model, with very minor variations) and the OS (because you ship your app with the one version of the PSX libraries that you have tested on). In contrast, desktop apps have to compatible with myriad versions of the OS and the hardware. Why is this difference so significant? It's simple. When there is a bug in the PSX libraries, you can just work around that bug. You know that it's there, you can test it, and when your app works again, it's fixed. But desktop apps cannot be debugged this way. Just because your app tests out and doesn't crash on your test configuration, that does not mean it is shippable. You need to be compatible with nearly all permutations of hardware configurations and OS versions. The result is that it is virtually impossible to ship a stable app on Windows, because Microsoft fixes and introduces so many bugs in each version of Windows. You tell how good the Playstation 1 system is, how bugfree it works, and then you still argue that this is not how you want desktop software to be, even though you want the desktop to be stable? Your posts seems to contradict itself. It doesn't matter what I want. You simply can't make desktop apps as stable as console games, because console games only need to be compatible with one configuration of hardware and software. Good thing too, because game developers are typically NOT software engineers and their hacker's methodology, while appropriate for rapid game development, would never produce stable desktop apps that could be reliably deployed on the countless possible desktop configurations. On the desktop, multiple apps can run at once, and they need to be compatible with each other and with myriad devices, microprocessors, OS versions, system extensions or DLLs, etc. etc. These complicated factors are simply not a concern on a console. Dave