Good question, although perhaps the threat of another mailstorm will bring
the big hammer down again 
I think there are a lot of variables involved in what it takes to get a bug
fixed. Severity certainly matters, but severity is to a certain extent ‘in
the eyes of the beholder’. To whom the bug initially gets reported certainly
matters. Revenue associations certainly matter. Who submits the bug
certainly matters (i.e. individual reputation.) Product life cycle certainly
matters - a bug reported against a beta product always has a much better
chance of getting fixed. And, I might add, all of these variables are
reasonable, this is not a Microsoft-bash. Consider the size of their
customer base - they have to perform triage at several levels.
I think that if you can submit a bug that demonstrably causes a system crash
on standard platforms with standard configurations under normal use, that
bug will get a lot of attention and will get fixed ASAP, for some value of
ASAP including ‘fixed in a future release’. Otherwise your mileage will vary
depending on the variables I listed plus a lot of other variables I’m sure I
didn’t even consider.
In general I advise clients to pursue the microsoft-fix approach but to also
pursue their own work-arounds. It hardly makes sense to make your own
product dependent on what some third party decides to do about a problem
that may not really matter to them at all.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jan Bottorff [mailto:xxxxx@pmatrix.com]
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2001 12:41 PM
To: NT Developers Interest List
Subject: [ntdev] Re: request for Microsoft regarding a parport.sys bug -
Sorry for off topic but I hope someone from Microsoft will read this
and forward to the apropriate guy who could send us an answer.
My personal experience has been bugs I report to Microsoft in the OS and
drivers often take years to get fixed.
I’d be interested in hearing if other developers have had similar or
different experiences? Does having various levels of paid support have any
effect on their responsiveness in fixing OS bugs?
- Jan
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