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From: west@turing.toronto.edu (Tom West)
Subject: Re: Microsoft Support (or lack of)
Message-ID: <1990Aug27.132321.24161@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Organization: CSRI, University of Toronto
References: <1990Aug24.115708.5428@sisd.kodak.com> <1990Aug25.000547.5258@ug.cs.dal.ca> <1990Aug27.113618.7851@watserv1.waterloo.edu>
Distribution: na
Date: 27 Aug 90 17:23:22 GMT
Lines: 25

  On the other hand, if you discover a bug in a Microsoft product, all technical
support will do is say "Yes, that's a bug".  They will not:

1)  Give patches to fix that bug.
2)  Give temporary updates so that you don't have to wait to the next release!
3)  EVEN GIVE KNOWN BUG LISTS!!!
4)  Give any indication as to when updates are coming to fix known bugs.

  All this for products (MSC 6.0) that cost many hundreds of dollars.  I know
of no larger company that would do this.  Sun, DEC, DG all publish bug lists
of their products.  MS expects the users to just sit with useless products
until they release 6.1, which we will no doubt have to pay for.

  This especially comes up when there are bad code generated (i.e. code that 
crashes when run.  I've found one and am terrified that there are other cases
that Microsoft knows about but won't report.  This is, of course, unacceptable
for producing commercial products.  If I release my companies product and it
crashes mysteriously, telling customers it's a compiler bug is *not* going to
cut it, and Microsoft obstructing efforts to avoid this is unappreciated.

					Tom West

				tomwest@gpu.utcs.utoronto.edu
					or
				   west@turing.toronto.edu