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

To: limtex who wrote (23520)	6/2/1999 4:08:00 AM
From: David Holloway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

limtex said: OK but MSFT have great tech support and they usually get things sorted out and quite quickly and you have one point of contact through which all porblems are channeled. You at least have the certainty of knowing there is one person to moan at and get acion. --- I'm intrigued by your view of Microsoft technical support. In what capacity have you worked with them? In general, I find that their feeling on any technical issue is "Our implementation is correct. The specification is incorrect. We don't care because we don't have to." This attitude is borne out in their broken implementation of DHCP where the NT server doesn't even bother to send bootfile parameters even when you _CONFIGURE IT INTO THE SERVER_ because their clients don't need it so who cares? Other examples abound. The SMB protocol specification ("Windows networking") includes a different bit shiftedness for a SINGLE packet type simply because their programmers were too foolish to inlclude an ugly pragma to force packing of the sctructures to a non-byte-aligned boundary. Fix the bug? No, break the implementation to match! As for the whole concept of working with users to fix problems. Years ago, I worked for a small Microsoft Solution Provider shop. Nobodies you might think. Except both of the two people who started it were on the inner circle of buddiebuddies with the the Access and VB teams respectively. They were at the top of the easter egg lists at the time because they did great work fixing and identifying bugs for MS. What's the point of this blather? The point is that we, along with the rest of the MS consulting planet, wanted them to fix MS networking in 1993. They had a known problem that occured with the introduction of NDIS3.x, where the multiple protocol stacks had a tendency to crash each other. If you ran NetBEUI and IPX (the default install!) they would crash each other off the machine with alarming regularity. The only reason anything worked was because they would load themselves again after nearly a minute of complete inoperability, missing data and all. Microsoft worked with people all right. They refused to fix the bugs until a big patch release came out called Windows 95. Every large corporation who had to support TCP/IP and IPX, or NetBEUI and IPX, which was a lot of them, was infomationally _crippled_. For more than a _year_. Did you wonder why all sorts of smart-seeming companies started thinking about OS/2? The point is, they didn't work with the needs of the majority of their target customer base. I fail to see how they'll work to accomodate individuals, corporations, heck even partners except the very most important. As far as giving a friendly interface to people who pay a lot to get it, that's all well and good. That's marketing. Hey, maybe some developers like it. Maybe you've had positive experiences with that. My experiences within the last 4 years of dealing with MS "Support" have been that it's an outsourced bunch of chuckleheads who MS cares about probably less than they care about their customers. I know people who have worked for such shops and it didn't sound that pretty. So maybe Microsoft is really responsive in some ways. But to sum up. I've never seen it. I've never heard of it. I've seen plenty of evidence to the contrary, and I've talked to contractors, employees of outsourcing, and employees of the mothership who all believe that MS is the AT&T of the 1960s.