AT&T Joining OSF

[Brandon S. Allbery]

As quoted from <670025 at hpclscu.HP.COM> by shankar at 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
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