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> I understand that Microsoft has a similar crew they can dispatch to any customer to get their business software working again. Yikes well I work for a large
by kmbond 7y ago
> I understand that Microsoft has a similar crew they can dispatch to any customer to get their business software working again.
Yikes well I work for a large corporation that uses tons of Microsoft software, and we use their dispatch team constantly. Granted, we are probably one of their largest customers. It's great to have such a resource. But the fact that we need it doesn't speak well for Microsoft -- I would prefer if we didn't need such a dispatch team on a constant basis.
- peterwwillis 7y agoThe fact that most people don't need to call said team might say more?
- ncmncm 7y agoWhat, that they are used to failures, expect them, and live with them? Before Microsoft, computers crashing was not considered an ordinary, everyday occurrence. I still recall my shock, back in the '90s, when I remarked to a Windows user that Unix didn't crash all the time, and he remarked that he went months without reinstalling. I learned that "crash" had been redefined! Microsoft really needs that emergency crew. What says more is that most people who call them don't need to call other crews.
- dekhn 7y agoMany people who worked on UNIX for years had plenty of experience with the kernel dumping core. I ran LINUX in the mid-90s and it wasn't extremely stable.
- ncmncm 7y agoI ran Linux, too, starting from Slackware on a CD, graduating to Debian. I don't know about your experience, but in my circles there was real tension between upgrading to a current kernel release, vs. maintaining your 180+ days uptime. I "apt dist-upgrade"-ed for well over a decade without a failure, through a half-dozen generations of host hardware. Only during the period when the i915 display driver was still buggy did I ever have failures. Even then, I could SSH in. So, compared to needing to reboot twice a day (common) or twice a week (lucky), and never once needing to reinstall, yes, it was extremely stable.
- kmbond 7y agoWell put. I think that with Microsoft products (at least for us) it's assumed that we will experience crashes, bugs, data loss, etc. At work we are all Microsoft (bringing in your own hardware is not permitted anyway). At home, I'm mostly macOS and Linux. While those aren't perfect either, I do not expect issues, whereas with Microsoft products I've simply learned to expect them.