Welcome to the world of the mediocre and lowest common denominator. All those people who use Windows: John Dvorak writing in PC Magazine estimates that there are a minimum of 30 billion Windows crashes per year – this according to Microsoft’s own statistics.
To give you an idea of how ridiculous that number is, here are few comparisons.
Thirty billion is the same as the estimated number of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way.
The number equals the gallons of much-needed fresh water that California will dump into the ocean because of continued and laughable mismanagement of the state and its resources.
The sum roughly equals the total Yuan China expects to invest in basic education and is coincidentally the amount of Yuan China loses because of tax-avoidance by multinational corporations.
The figure is also the same as the assistance, in US dollars, the IMF is giving Brazil.
This is the upper end, in dirhams, of what Morocco says it must spend on its infrastructure in the next ten years.
And 30 billion is the magic number for the Enron scam as well as the global cost of SARS.
I can go on and on. Microsoft seems to be in good company with the magic number of 30 billion. I’m partial to the number zero. Maybe that should be the target.
Is there any other industry where people put up with such blantantly horrible, flawed, difficult to use products? If Microsoft was not a behemoth monopoly, would people use it’s products? Are they simply forced to because everyone else is doing it?
I subscribe to the philosophy that third-grade teachers have taught for eons: “If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?”
[Update, Aug. 9: Take a look at this hilarious example of how Windows fails in “mission critical” applications…]
