The Poor Quality Explained
Microsoft might be forgiven for stealing intellectual property if they actually improved on the product's that they stole from their competitors. But instead, Microsoft has consistently churned out expensive, buggy, hard-to-use, memory-hogging software.
For the average computer user, it seems perfectly natural for their computer to crash once per day. But is this really normal? Windows 95 (and still with Windows 98), Microsoft's mainstream operating system, frequently reports cryptic error messages or hangs on its user. In contrast, many other operating systems rarely crash more than a few times in a year. This is the result of using an operating system originally designed in 1975 for a different computer and for a command line text interface, and applying patch after patch to it for the past 23 years. The number and complexity of problems that Windows 95 and Windows 98 users face daily can be accurately viewed by taking a quick browse through the Internet newsgroup, alt.os.windows95.crash.crash.crash. Although Microsoft would have you believe otherwise, even they know that Windows NT, Microsoft's industrial strength OS, is less stable than most flavors of its primary competitor, Unix.
Microsoft's buggy work doesn't end with its operating systems. From Office to FrontPage, Microsoft does not seem to be capable of producing a stable piece of software. ActiveX actually permits any web page you visit to shutdown your computer without your consent, or worse. There was once a time, right after the debut of Internet Explorer 3.0, when bug fixes were literally being released at the rate of several per day. IE 4.0, its latest incarnation, has caused Windows 95 computers everywhere to become significantly slower and much more crash-prone than before, and it's very hard to delete, as some unhappy customers have discovered.
According to John C. Dvorak, a columnist for PC Computing, he recently received a Visual Basic error while running Office 97. Was Office really created using Visual Basic? If so, that would explain its slow, unstable performance. Due to "features" that most users will never have a practical use for, Microsoft programs are so bloated that sluggish performance has become their trademark. And memory requirements are outrageous. Office takes up over 150 megabytes of hard disk space, and requires 32 megs of RAM to run with somewhat bearable performance. ClarisWorks, one of its competitors, can fit on three megabytes of hard disk space and run swiftly on a computer with eight megs of RAM, while being capable of accomplishing the majority of tasks that Office is used for and still being easier to use. Furthermore, Internet Explorer 4.0 takes up over 60 megabytes of hard disk space and requires a good 10 megs of RAM all to itself! Netscape Navigator, by contrast, takes up only 15 megabytes of your drive and uses merely four megs of RAM.
All that bloat, and their programs still produce mountains of headaches while not being nearly as productive as the competition. I've had my own experiences. The user interface of Microsoft software is so counter-intuitive that it took me two days just to help someone transfer his Outlook 97 files from one computer to another! Windows 95, despite its claims of being Mac-like, is still "dirty" (though not so "quick") at its heart.
What's worse, Microsoft charges several hundred dollars to upgrade most of its products. But these upgrades are mandatory. Try opening an Excel 97 file with Excel 95 and you'll see what I mean. And what merits the spending of this fortune? A few bug fixes (with many more new bugs) and some more features you'll never use.
Windows 98 simply "integrates" Internet Explorer with the operating system so that instead of having to spend time double-clicking on an icon to browse the Internet, you can instead spend time waiting for your computer all the time while the web browser slows it down because it's always running. Finally, Microsoft has added another "innovation": the interface of the Internet being incorporated into Windows. What Microsoft doesn't realize is that the interface of web pages is a huge step back from the standard desktop metaphor, and only exists because it's easy to program for and saves bandwith. Arrogantly, Microsoft is charging $95 to upgrade, when all that Windows 98 is is simply a bug fix that spent three years in the making. You can expect many more bugs, too.
Despite Microsoft's lousy products, technical support costs $95 "per incident," and usually Microsoft will end up claiming that either you have done something wrong or that it's the hardware's fault. Good luck.
I've got to give Microsoft credit for its advertising, however. Bill Gates knows that most people don't buy good products. They buy good marketing.
