3 ms·

I think you are getting it very wrong. What guarantee used to mean is that if product has manufacturing defects then these will appear within limited period of

I think you are getting it very wrong. What guarantee used to mean is that if product has manufacturing defects then these will appear within limited period of time. Having a 5 year guarantee for a car does not mean that it will fall apart after this period of time. It means that defects that occur after this period of time are due to wear and not manufacturing defects. The main difference between a software product and say a car is that it appears that manufacturing defects of the software would take much longer to appear than 2 or 5 years. Sometimes it may take even 10-20 years for a defect to appear. The main issue with Microsoft software is that the problem, when it becomes apparent, can not be fixed by the owner as it could be with any other product. This is caused by the closed nature of the Microsoft software. Another thing you get wrong is that you call XP a $80 product. It is not. It is a $80 x number of owners product.

falcolas 9y ago
> can not be fixed by the owner as it could be with any other product I think this is nice in theory, but impractical with our current level of technology. If your toaster broke, would you be able to fix it? How many owners have the analog circuit knowledge to fix even a toaster from the pre-IC world? Would you be willing to invest the tens of hours and dollars required to fix it? Or would you just go buy a new one for $20? Aside from people who train to do so, even your above-average owner can not maintain or repair a modern car drivetrain. Or an IC which has, thorough the laws of physics, formed whiskers that have caused it to short out. Most people couldn't even replace such an IC, even if given all the fairly specialized tools. Nor could they realistically learn enough about programming to realistically find and repair defects in a 45 million LOC codebase. Hell, as a (as called by peers in the past) above-average programmer, I couldn't grok 45M lines of code in anything resembling a reasonable timeframe. Just opening the source is not enough. And just as car maintenance costs money (sometimes more than the car cost originally), if you want software patches past a reasonable span of time, those are going to cost money.

falcolas 9y ago

> can not be fixed by the owner as it could be with any other product I think this is nice in theory, but impractical with our current level of technology. If your toaster broke, would you be able to fix it? How many owners have the analog circuit knowledge to fix even a toaster from the pre-IC world? Would you be willing to invest the tens of hours and dollars required to fix it? Or would you just go buy a new one for $20? Aside from people who train to do so, even your above-average owner can not maintain or repair a modern car drivetrain. Or an IC which has, thorough the laws of physics, formed whiskers that have caused it to short out. Most people couldn't even replace such an IC, even if given all the fairly specialized tools. Nor could they realistically learn enough about programming to realistically find and repair defects in a 45 million LOC codebase. Hell, as a (as called by peers in the past) above-average programmer, I couldn't grok 45M lines of code in anything resembling a reasonable timeframe. Just opening the source is not enough. And just as car maintenance costs money (sometimes more than the car cost originally), if you want software patches past a reasonable span of time, those are going to cost money.