I try to keep a perspective on M$, but it's difficult when every day, at least ONCE a day, I'm faced with their basic incompetence. I work in an M$-orient(at)ed shop, so much so, in fact, that we have a very close relationship with The Redmond Raiders. We're joined at the wallet, quite literally. Half our architecture team spend a good deal of their time in WA praying at the M$ Holy Billy Gates Tabernacle's altar. It's .NET this, .NET that and we keep getting briefings on the latest incarnation of M$'s NEXT operating system currently codenamed Longhorn. This new OS is all-singing and all-dancing but the one thing I know for certain about it is that it will crash regularly and spectacularly. That's kinda comforting, because I would be horrified if M$ did a competent job on something. My whole world view would be changed overnight and I would have to do penance. But I'm certain I'm safe from having to light candles and say "Hail Billys".
In fact, I've just been interrupted by 'er indoors, who's had Windoze Exploder crash on her leaving her unable to do anything except CTRL-ALT-DEL her W2K machine. And W2K is by far the most stable of the current crop of M$ OSs, which is why I chose it over XP, which means "eXPerimental", I'm sure. I have this abortive attempt at an OS on my work laptop and it gives me grief every day. I've also had Word fail to open two files (with no explanation) and Excel crash catastrophically in the past 10 hours.
I'm right up to date on all the security patches. I clean up my registry religiously. But the OSs churned out by all those "bright" people are unfinished works, and will forever remain so. I hope I can get to the end of the night without having to reboot MY machine ...
