Comment by tored
3 years ago
The idea of introducing bugs to users that doesn’t conform 100% to intended use of your software is not good idea, what will happen is that your software will be perceived as buggy in general.
3 years ago
The idea of introducing bugs to users that doesn’t conform 100% to intended use of your software is not good idea, what will happen is that your software will be perceived as buggy in general.
> what will happen is that your software
Not your software, a competitor's software. The intent here was to inject bugs to make DRDOS look bad. And it worked.
Later Microsoft would have to spend many long years dealing with how many extension points they'd put in Windows which were opportunities for third parties to inject crashes accidentally into Microsoft executables. That's why there's an entire subsystem to allow video drivers to crash and restart.
You are literally commenting under an article of a company having a 2billion market cap, built also from such underhanded tactics.
While it's immoral, it doesn't seem to produce the result that you hope it's be producing.
Microsoft's software is definitely perceived as buggy (And I never said anything about revenue).
Those users would have been running DR-DOS, meaning they would assume THAT software is buggy.
Which was the entire point and intention, as we saw in an email chain that came out during court.
Most people will tolerate the bugs until they absolutely cannot use whatever software they're running though.
Depends on whether it's common or not. If a smaller competitor has bugs, the default is something else, and folks will go yo the default and look askance at the ones sticking with the odd duck software. Source: Linux user since the 90s, LibreOffice/OpenOffice/StarOffice since early '00s.
When they reach that unusability limit, most people will call their IT department and have the offending buggy software reinstalled as a fix. IT won’t remove your buggy copy of Microsoft Word and Teams and replace it with WordPerfect and Slack.
But Word has competitors like GSuite so it cannot be completely complacent. People are making these buying decisions constantly.
1 reply →
I should have said "people and organizations" because that's what I meant.
The mechanism with organizations works like you said yes. They'll just develop processes to work around the bugs until it becomes completely impossible.
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