Micheal Espinola Jr wrote:
Bruce, I don't think you are going to find hard "evidence" for either
conclusion. But Bruce's conclusion is consistent with my own
experiences, and that of many other Administrators that I discuss
issues like this with.
Since its inception, supporting NT 3.0 beta and onward, I have been
dealing with BSOD's. In total, there have been comparatively very few
times were it was a direct fault of MS code. It has very commonly
been in relation to 3rd party drivers that needed reworking or
updating by the 3rd-party manufacturer.
This is not PR spin (of which I don't think you could find any
published PR spin for either side of this argument either). This is
real world experience with the NT+ products across i386 and Alpha
hardware platforms using peripheral devices from many different major
manufactures. There are admins on both sides of the anti-MS fence
that I communicate with that would agree with this conclusion.
I agree, in general, that the vast majority of the BSODs I've seen on
the NT line have been caused by bad drivers. On occassion, though, I
have seen poorly written software that has BSOD'ed NT 4.0 before.
However, the original topic was about users and their exposure to
Microsoft products. User exposure to the NT line really began with
Windows XP (aside from a smattering of Win2k installed desktops)... so
the real initial exposure that users have had to Microsoft products is
actually the DOS/Win9x line and those most certainly crashed frequently
in situations where a driver wasn't necessarily the culprit.
Not to mention the fact that a Windows XP or 2000 system can still crash
without getting a BSOD, and that crashes of either the OS or
applications can and do regularly occur. Further, the argument that
third party drivers are always the cause and that merging code bases is
not Microsoft's problem completely and totally ignores the fact that
other OS' don't have the frequency of crashes experienced while using
third party code that MS does.
So, whether it be the shoddy coding that causes BSOD's in the
DOS-dependant line of MS apps, or the shoddy coding that causes IE to
freeze on Windows XP... or the shoddy coding that third parties carry
out and that Microsoft allows to affect the system in such a way...
nonetheless the net result is the same... the user's expectation has
been lowered.
-bkfsec
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