MSFT has had many ways to show their large tin ears and lack of regard for
the customers that buy them their spiffy toys. None of the softies is just
scraping buy. You pay them handsomly for what you're getting. You also pay
them to ignore many many bugs. Note they wouldn't tell the NY Times how
many bugs they have or any detail after their Wagner Edstrom ad flacks got
them a featured article in the business section.
Let's put this in persective particularly if you are a Technet or an MSDN
subscriber, or even gasp, the unwashed public:
1) According to the Times, and this information is hard to get from MSFT
because they always claim they don't know when they do or that it's on their
site when it isn't when you ask any of them:
A Challenge For Exterminators
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/technology/09vista.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
"This coordinated introduction is a multibillion-dollar proposition for
Microsoft, which has Windows running on some 845 million computers worldwide
and Office on more than 450 million, according to the market research firm
Gartner."
2) If you're MSDN or Technet you pay $900 or so for your membership. If
they aren't responsive to you and you don't have someone to call as a
conscierge or helper as most organizations have when you pay that kind of
money, demand it--because any other organization would accomodate you for
that kind of scratch with a smile. MSFT is constantly trying to sell
subscriptions on the web and at meetings.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/products/subscriptions/default.aspx
I found a UK Softie promoting Technet Plus for about $$506.4 dollars.
They don't have as many members as they'd like, because you can stand on a
street corner for a good while asking well dressed members of the public if
they know what a Technet or an MSDN is and they won't. But most of them
have no idea of the last 3 Presidents or their adjacent states and their
capitals in my country--finding an adult who doesn't do federal appellate
work that knows a S. Ct. cert needs 4 votes--priceless and it won't
happen--welcome to America the educated where one out of four graduates high
school and if you know kids going to Harvard, Yale or Stanford, most of them
cannot write acceptably at the freshman college level and have readvery few
classics or much else notable on the reading lists a few years ago. Welcome
to the net, and Web 2.0, Mr. Ozzie, and GTA San Andraes.
It is a country that has demonstrated unparalled apathy at death in Iraq as
long as there is no shared sacrifice and a population of largely ethnic
minorities have been contracted to take the risk, and the money hemorrhage
to criminal contractors has been eggregious with the planning and direction
done by a former pharmaceutical executive named Rumsfield. The limits of
the apathy to a population whose privacy has now been ransacked and has no
habeas corpus left is intriguing but it is apparently infinite. Perhaps it
will move just a notch come the first Tuesday in November as Vista ships and
a small percent of its people vote--most of whom don't know half the
candidates on the ballot.
2) No feedback portal exists for you on Connect. No bug info portal exists
for you either.
3) MSFT refuses to reveal info on bug progress that is substantive in any of
their PR media planted articles.
4) When you purchase a computer, if you don't build your own, you will be
paying one of 300 named partners for the privilege and MSFT will profit
handsomely for the pre-loaded Vista or Office of Longhorn Server software on
the box. You will have nothing whatsoever that has a decent chance of
reaching Desmond Lee's (PM MSFT Win RE Team) Startup Repair or these two
screens from OEM media that is not the OS or Server (recovery discs or
hidden or not so hidden partitions). This custom existed throughout Win 2K
and XP and every other OS, and it exists during Vista>Blackcomb Vienna. You
don't have to get used to it; you obviously have swallowed it.
If you are one of us who likes to recover lost OS's for MSFT customers since
their Indian Convergys of Ohio supoprt contractors have obvious problems
figuring out how to get this done, then you will quickly find out what
happens when you exhaust the Windows Advanced Options Menu at F8, that even
if they had and its rare known to preinstall the Recovery Console your
success will be limited in recovering Vista) and without the DVD as without
the CD in XP, you won't be taking them to these screens:
System Recovery Options
http://blogs.itecn.net/photos/liuhui/images/2014/500x375.aspx
Win RE Choices including Startup Repair
http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/4/42/Windows_Vista_System_Recovery.png
CH
