3 ms·

It's very very hard to take a company seriously that persistently have ridiculously lame bugs in their code and systems. For example Windows Azure suffered out

It's very very hard to take a company seriously that persistently have ridiculously lame bugs in their code and systems. For example Windows Azure suffered outages in February because the programmers did not anticipate a leap year happening. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/02/29/microsoft-windows-azure-cloud-service-suffers-big-outage/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/02/29/microsoft-...

mattmanser 15y ago
Jeezus, don't be so melodramatic and selective, everyone creates bugs. Remember when android would lose text messages? Or Amazon's supposedly redundant system went down all at once? Don't point a finger at MS for what wasn't even a complete outage. And not taking the biggest and most successful software company in the world seriously makes you look like a complete fanboi tool.
- drhowarddrfine 15y ago
  Talk about "fanboi". Microsoft may be big but, on the internet, they have far less experience and far less usage. The internet isn't the desktop. There, Microsoft is a small player.
- mibbitier 15y ago
  McDonalds are the biggest and most successful restaurant in the world. But I doubt any chef would describe their food as being fantastic. When I want to eat a really nice meal with friends or family, I rule out McDonalds. Does this make me a "fanboi tool"? Microsoft have a pretty long history of date related bugs in their software and products stretching back years. They do not seem to understand how leap years work. Windows 98: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/150947.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/150947.stm Zune: http://bit-player.org/2009/the-zune-bug http://bit-player.org/2009/the-zune-bug Excel: "Excel 2000 incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year" Exchange 2007: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/04/microsoft_admits_to_exchange_leap_year_bug/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/04/microsoft_admits_to_... etc etc
  - minhajuddin 15y ago
    Mc Donald's is not used by the 90% of the world. Microsoft clearly is a very successful company which builds great products. Just because their philosophy doesn't align with mine, or because I like Linux doesn't mean I have to diss them. Look at Kinect for example, It. Is. Revolutionary.
    - mibbitier 15y ago
      I'd guess McDonalds has a similar market share in food as Microsoft has in software... Do you disagree? I bought a Kinect. I used it for a couple of days. It had a novelty value, but no staying power. I don't think I'm alone there. In any event, my original point was that trusting your hosting to a company which had an outage due to not foreseeing a leap year, may not be a good decision. Outages due to particularly hairy code related to redundancy and failover etc, I can forgive. But an outage caused by a leap year? No way.
      - minhajuddin 15y ago
        You my friend are not aware of the radical things people are doing with kinect, just the other day I saw a demo of a quad copter with a kinect on top of it, and once you release it into a room, it will give you the whole 3D profile of the house without a human controlling it! If that does that not dazzle you, I am not sure what does. And about the bug being a leap year bug is really a nonissue, a bug is a bug. An year ago, Github nuked their whole production database, because of a deployment glitch. We all create softwares with bugs, it's the response to that which matters. And, Microsoft does a stellar job at that.
  - jamesYC2011 15y ago
    Yes, yes; this obviously makes Microsoft irrelevant roll eyes Some of you need to be treated for Microsoft Derangement Syndrome.
    - mibbitier 15y ago
      It makes them as relevant as McDonalds is, when I'm considering where to go to get some good food.
untog 15y ago
Didn't Apple have a similar issue with time changes? While I'm not excusing either, it isn't necessarily symptomatic of widespread failure.
tjoff 15y ago
Sony says hi, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3#Leap_year_bug http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3#Leap_year_bug And Apple can't even handle regular years or daylight time: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/01/01/apple_admits_new_years_alarm_bug.html http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/01/01/apple_admits_n... And handling this in a phone or game device should be about as difficult as on a clock... A cloud on the other hand is much more difficult, as google points out: http://googleblog.blogspot.se/2011/09/time-technology-and-leaping-seconds.html http://googleblog.blogspot.se/2011/09/time-technology-and-le... Claiming that Microsofts progammers didn't even anticipate a leap year is kind of pathetic. Sure, it might have been an unnecessary bug (whether it was or not is not possible to decide from that article), but most bugs are...
- mibbitier 15y ago
  Sure, it happens in other areas too. But the last place you want it happening is on a hosting platform. The consequences of your hosting being down are larger than not getting an alarm on your iphone or being able to connect to PSN.
cooldeal 15y ago
By that same metric, Apple also cannot be taken seriously because they can't do Daylight Savings Time right, even their bug fix had a bug. http://www.pcworld.com/article/222029/iphones_daylight_saving_time_bug_bites_again.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/222029/iphones_daylight_savin...
- jwoah12 15y ago
  I was just about to point this out. It caused me to not wake up on time and miss a major family event. It was also one of the reasons I got rid of my iPhone. The (lack of) backlash that this bug caused really made me understand how ridiculous the situation had gotten with Apple's infallible perception.
pilsetnieks 15y ago
I'd prefer lame bugs over serious ones, like Amazon's EC2 data loss last year.

mattmanser 15y ago

Jeezus, don't be so melodramatic and selective, everyone creates bugs. Remember when android would lose text messages? Or Amazon's supposedly redundant system went down all at once? Don't point a finger at MS for what wasn't even a complete outage. And not taking the biggest and most successful software company in the world seriously makes you look like a complete fanboi tool.

drhowarddrfine 15y ago
Talk about "fanboi". Microsoft may be big but, on the internet, they have far less experience and far less usage. The internet isn't the desktop. There, Microsoft is a small player.
mibbitier 15y ago
McDonalds are the biggest and most successful restaurant in the world. But I doubt any chef would describe their food as being fantastic. When I want to eat a really nice meal with friends or family, I rule out McDonalds. Does this make me a "fanboi tool"? Microsoft have a pretty long history of date related bugs in their software and products stretching back years. They do not seem to understand how leap years work. Windows 98: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/150947.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/150947.stm Zune: http://bit-player.org/2009/the-zune-bug http://bit-player.org/2009/the-zune-bug Excel: "Excel 2000 incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year" Exchange 2007: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/04/microsoft_admits_to_exchange_leap_year_bug/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/04/microsoft_admits_to_... etc etc
- minhajuddin 15y ago
  Mc Donald's is not used by the 90% of the world. Microsoft clearly is a very successful company which builds great products. Just because their philosophy doesn't align with mine, or because I like Linux doesn't mean I have to diss them. Look at Kinect for example, It. Is. Revolutionary.
  - mibbitier 15y ago
    I'd guess McDonalds has a similar market share in food as Microsoft has in software... Do you disagree? I bought a Kinect. I used it for a couple of days. It had a novelty value, but no staying power. I don't think I'm alone there. In any event, my original point was that trusting your hosting to a company which had an outage due to not foreseeing a leap year, may not be a good decision. Outages due to particularly hairy code related to redundancy and failover etc, I can forgive. But an outage caused by a leap year? No way.
    - minhajuddin 15y ago
      You my friend are not aware of the radical things people are doing with kinect, just the other day I saw a demo of a quad copter with a kinect on top of it, and once you release it into a room, it will give you the whole 3D profile of the house without a human controlling it! If that does that not dazzle you, I am not sure what does. And about the bug being a leap year bug is really a nonissue, a bug is a bug. An year ago, Github nuked their whole production database, because of a deployment glitch. We all create softwares with bugs, it's the response to that which matters. And, Microsoft does a stellar job at that.
- jamesYC2011 15y ago
  Yes, yes; this obviously makes Microsoft irrelevant roll eyes Some of you need to be treated for Microsoft Derangement Syndrome.
  - mibbitier 15y ago
    It makes them as relevant as McDonalds is, when I'm considering where to go to get some good food.

untog 15y ago

Didn't Apple have a similar issue with time changes? While I'm not excusing either, it isn't necessarily symptomatic of widespread failure.

tjoff 15y ago

Sony says hi, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3#Leap_year_bug http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3#Leap_year_bug And Apple can't even handle regular years or daylight time: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/01/01/apple_admits_new_years_alarm_bug.html http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/01/01/apple_admits_n... And handling this in a phone or game device should be about as difficult as on a clock... A cloud on the other hand is much more difficult, as google points out: http://googleblog.blogspot.se/2011/09/time-technology-and-leaping-seconds.html http://googleblog.blogspot.se/2011/09/time-technology-and-le... Claiming that Microsofts progammers didn't even anticipate a leap year is kind of pathetic. Sure, it might have been an unnecessary bug (whether it was or not is not possible to decide from that article), but most bugs are...

mibbitier 15y ago
Sure, it happens in other areas too. But the last place you want it happening is on a hosting platform. The consequences of your hosting being down are larger than not getting an alarm on your iphone or being able to connect to PSN.

cooldeal 15y ago

By that same metric, Apple also cannot be taken seriously because they can't do Daylight Savings Time right, even their bug fix had a bug. http://www.pcworld.com/article/222029/iphones_daylight_saving_time_bug_bites_again.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/222029/iphones_daylight_savin...

jwoah12 15y ago
I was just about to point this out. It caused me to not wake up on time and miss a major family event. It was also one of the reasons I got rid of my iPhone. The (lack of) backlash that this bug caused really made me understand how ridiculous the situation had gotten with Apple's infallible perception.

pilsetnieks 15y ago

I'd prefer lame bugs over serious ones, like Amazon's EC2 data loss last year.