On Mon, 29 Jan 2007, Dotan Cohen wrote:
The paranoid survive.
Yes, but they feel like they're being watched all the time for some reason.
McAfree, PartitionMagic and Norton are already in bed with MS. Keeping big business afloat while drowning the little guy is something that MS has done many times in the past. What does MS care if MoshePartition suddenly stops working?
MS cares more about MoshePartitions than about big business. Big business does not buy functionality, it buys 'deals'. 50% off the license bundle and a service contract and the buying suit gets a bonus from his leader suits. 1000 cubicles and 50 IT support personnel will weep over this for two years. The suit won't weep, all expenses paid bonus trips to Bahamas or Cancun don't make people weep. Also the deal will figure prominently under 'achievements' in his CV. He might even have used the 'L' word to get the 50% off.
The MoshePartitions must be kept happy with animations, buzzwords and sufficient service on the phone to prevent them from starting class action suits. Notice that suits never start class action suits (hehe) for some reason. Keeping MoshePartitions happy is harder than satisfying suits, since the beta testing is continuous and hard to influence by lobby or bonuses. When m$ was caught financing self-prozelytization by paying off bloggers (with free laptops among other things), the reaction was predictable.
For every corporate user there must be 1000 individual users out there. Even if only 10% of them are paying promptly they outnumber the corporate users 10:1. Making sure that something simple and inexpensive will keep the MoshePartitions going (like reinstalling) has been what has kept m$ systems going for the little user, together with hypnotizing small users into the idea that backups are expensive and that data loss is a given thing. That includes data loss by 'upgrading' to incompatible file formats.
And most suits who buy quality or make uptime commitments think thrice about what exctly they buy. With uptimes at most in the 0.9 range (including network) a 10 machine installation means a 0.35 probability for any machine to work right at any given time. In fact the highest number of networked machines with 0.9 such that the probability for any one of them to be up (>= 0.5) is 6 ;-) It follows that networks with more than 6 computers need a technician chained to the desk or a support contract. The fact that most servers used are not of the m$ variety is not an accident, it is a consequence of what happens to business when they go down.
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