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... Others, like Microsloth, use market leverage, intentional incompatibility, and intentional dead-ends (anybody remember Win32s?) to suppress competition and keep user expectations low.
For example I run the Timing and Scoring system for my daughters high school swim meets. $55,000 worth of hardware and software. The program runs on Windoze and crashes routinely throughout the meets. 'Illegal function call in &(*&^(*$# " and such. We must stop the meet and restart the program. The developers have 'fixed' the problem by leaving behind bread-crumbs so that upon restart it knows it was in timing mode and which event is next so it automatically goes there. (A big time saver for those frequent crashes!) This system has been running for FOUR years (this is my first running it). The developers say it is excellent now, nearly bug free! (gasp choke!) The swim coach agrees that it is much better, BUT..... Last night it cost a swimmer a disqualification because the program crashed as the swimmers stepped up. I called to the meet official to wait but he didn't say 'step down' so when one girl fell into the pool (the #1 swimmer in the event) she got the DQ. I argued that it shouldn't be her fault a) that the computer crashed and b) that he didn't have them step down. No matter. (Note: Swimmer was on the opposing team.) After the second meed I was ranting to the developer about how bad it was for code like this to blow up 8 or more times in a 2 hour meet! "Unacceptable" I said. "Is it 4th year beta code?" and on and on I went. After about 10 minutes of ragging on the guy I realized the coach wasn't saying anything and I thought perhaps I had overstepped my meager authority. So I stopped and asked "Am I out of line here?" He just smiled and said, "Glad to see at least one other person in this world who doesn't think Windows programs crashing every 15 minutes is acceptable. Keep going!" Later he said "You work on computers right? Don't you deal with all day long?" I explained the iSeries. Next question: "Can we get one of these programs to that run on an iSeries?" :-))
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