[CLUE-Talk] Microsoft incompetence of negligence?

[Dennis J Perkins]

> ....
> > I suspect companies are starting to consider suing Microsoft 
> > after these last two weeks.  Never mind that the license says MS is only
> > responsible for replacing defective CDs.  Microsoft has cost companies
> > millions or billions of dollars in labor, lost sales, etc, because of
> > the problems inherent in thier products.
> 
> With the current admin and laws, zero chance of getting anything.
> To be honest, it is these companies fault. What should be happening is that 
> CEO's should be firing CIO's that push this crap. They will not be.

I know.  The president of my company is a gung-ho Microsoft user.  I am the 
only Unix/Linux person left here.  I don't expect changes.

> >
> > It might also spur legislation limiting how much software companies can
> > avoid liability.  This is unfortunate.  Hopefully such legislation will
> > be balanced because the truth is that it is very difficult to remove all
> > bugs from software.  Maybe software can be rated on the basis of its
> > history, since it is impossible to rate it on bugs that have yet to be
> > discovered.  But those bugs should give some indication to the quality
> > of that software.
> 
> Zero chance of this as well. To be honest, I am happy about that. The more 
> that MS is a f*** up the better it is for us. And you can count on MS being 
> nothing but a F*** up for the year (hopefully longer).


Perhaps.  But Microsoft products are now costing companies money and lost 
productivity in a way that is getting harder to ignore.  If this continues, 
they will start considering lawsuits.  Some of these companies are big and 
money talks.
 
> >
> > And maybe the govt should also mandate that any software it buys adheres
> > to certain accepted open standards.  I'm not saying it needs to create
> > the standards.  But I think that even MS would be forced to adhere to
> > open standards or lose a lot of business.  And companies that deal with
> > the govt would also want those standards.  It could be a chain reaction.
> > Most of Micrsoft's profits in software come from its operating systems
> > and Office.  Document and communication protocol standards weaken that
> > monopoly.
> 
> This will not happen. First, this admin is heavily indebted to gates/MS. 
Loads 
> of contributions.  I also think that ppl like Bush/Owens should not be 
> attached between  gates' front pockets, but that is the way some politicians 
> operate.
> But to be honest, I would not want to see it. There are far too many laws 
that 
> are passed to say buy this or buy that. There is so much pork and nepotism 
> that it is killing our country.


I don't want to see it either.  Laws often get passed as bandaids.  Bandaids 
make poor solutions.


> If you really want to do something, start a business folks. I have been 
> pushing it. I am in a company that is selling Linux systems and I would love 
> to hear of others that move into it as well. Preferably in other markets.
> Calls are coming just due to Ernie Ball's article and now this. In about 1-2 
> more weeks, it should be coming out that the black out was caused by an alarm 
> system be taken out of commision; guess why.

You might be right about the blackout.  But that doesn't explain why it lasted 
so long.  The bigger culprit is probably deregulation.  Power companies were 
supposed to generate power or to deliver it, not both.  This also seemed to 
push many companies towards foolish investments that they knew nothing about.

I used to work in the power industry.  It used to be conservative and only want 
technology that had proven itself for 10 years.  That became too restrictive 
because of computers and it eventually dropped that attitude.  When I visited 
the power plant I used to work at, I noticed that a new control system used 
Windows NT as the front end.  The back end was still a stable, reliable system, 
but that doesn't help if the user interface has just crashed and you need to 
react to a problem.  The back end will trip the unit because you couldn't 
correct the problem.