Re: [changed to] Why stability is secondary to some companies

> > The “video card that locked the bus” should have had such notice, or been

Yes, a common example of the vendor’s ignorance.

My understanding is this was NOT done out of ignorance, it was decided to
be this way by top management. The bottom line was if the company got top
benchmark scores in a magazine article, it represented millions of dollars
in sales. Weighing current quarter sales vs. pissing off customers for the
next 10 years is a tricky decision. Management at public corporations have
a legal responsibility to the stockholders to maximize profit, generally in
terms of short term profit. Lawsuits over bad management decisions are
common, lawsuits over inserting unfriendly code are a lot less common. It
doesn’t seem like there is much chance of getting companies to make
decisions in favor of stability when THEY may loose financially in the
short term.

If the playing field is leveled by OS enforcement then there simply isn’t
code that can be written to trade performance for stability. Basically, the
OS gods decide the needs of the many (stability) outweigh the needs of the
few (top performance). As long as SOME competitor has the ability to do
tricks then everybody has little choice but to also do tricks.

Microsoft also has this same problem. Say they changed things to run
drivers in a protected environment, and performance degraded. If sales
decline because it’s now slower but more stable, Microsoft stockholders may
sue claiming management made a bad decision. They have no choice but to do
what drives sales to the majority, even if the majority makes their
decisions based on total marketing BS.

It’s pretty hard to make marketing glitter about stability, although
peripheral companies brag about their 500,000 hour MTBF. Since engineers
have TOTAL control over OS software, it seems odd that a rotating piece of
metal, with bearings, and little magnetic sensors floating an extremely
small distance away can have orders of magnitudes better reliability. I
have to assume most OS vendors don’t brag about their reliability because
it’s not very good.

I hate to say it, but feel an OS that the majority of people base their
computing infrastructure on should NOT be controlled by a public for-profit
corporation, because of exactly this conflict between what’s technically
best and what’s financially best short term for the company.

I think the situation might have been better had Microsoft stuck with the
original concept of NT where stability ruled, potentially reducing their
profit to only an excellent level, instead of an outrageous level. Instead,
over the years, they made more and more compromises in favor of
performance. Rumor is Bill Gates made the decision to junk a lot of the
elegant LPC architecture that was originally in place, because at the time
it was “too slow”. As CEO of a public company, this was perhaps the right
decision, but perhaps the wrong technical decision long term. Now that
hardware is faster, making tradoffs in favor of maximum stability would
have positioned things much better.

I could go on, but I’ll shut up now…

  • Jan

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