Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!ukma!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!hal!ncoast!allbery From: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: AT&T Joining OSF Message-ID: <12143@ncoast.UUCP> Date: 10 Aug 88 22:55:31 GMT References: <347@spies.UUCP> <670025@hpclscu.HP.COM> Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) Followup-To: comp.unix.wizards Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh Lines: 31 As quoted from <670025@hpclscu.HP.COM> by shankar@hpclscu.HP.COM (Shankar Unni): +--------------- | > seems to be Mr. Chambers' point. OSF will not have to worry about | > sales budget, software quality, etc. | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ | How do you think IBM sells anything? Product quality is usually priority | number 1 (like the Ford commercial :-)) at most of the big players in the | business. The features that we jocks like may not be there in their entirety, | but you can be sure that what *is* there is thoroughly tested. Hell hath no | fury like the DP manager whose end-of-the-month payroll run has been disrupted | by a system failure. +--------------- Have you told Bill Gates about this recently? There are quite a few examples of Microsoft products that went out quite buggy (can you say "MSC"? [It took them 4 tries!!!] How about "MS Word 3.0 on Macintosh"? And I recall a Xenix release for the original ncoast which reformatted our hard drive while running, although that may have been Tandy's fault). A company as big as Microsoft or IBM can sell by name value alone; all too often this results in the product value approaching zero. A company which operates like IBM (i.e. proprietary hardware and software) also has a captive audience, which makes product testing an even lower priority. This is considered to be good for the Almighty Bottom Line ("Gee, we can sell *anything*, whether it works or not! Why waste time and money testing it first? That hurts the bottom line!"). (In case it's not obvious, I think that when we get around to hanging the lawyers, the MBAs ought to be hanged at the same time. But I'll get off the soapbox now....) -- Brandon S. Allbery, uunet!marque!ncoast!allbery DELPHI: ALLBERY For comp.sources.misc send mail to ncoast!sources-misc