Damn, your guess sounds quite plausible.
Also, everything is awful.
Also, everything is awful.
Microsoft made a special point of getting people used to the idea that nothing can be expected to work right. Before Microsoft, if something didn't work, you sent it back for a refund, angrily. Since, it is "Have you tried rebooting it?" No refunds, ever.
Everybody else relaxed into a Microsoft level of expectation. Anybody who doesn't, spends money their competitors don't.
(If you are too young to remember: this is literally true.)
(I've been a professional programmer since the mid 1980's, so I do remember. )
Have you used Office? Whatever those apps are now, online, in Teams, stand-alone, it’s a steaming mess. Various functions work in various places and things like moving an image are just ridiculously broken.
It isn’t this bad with other vendors.
My point is that Microsoft isn’t unusual in this regard at all, except that their software has become very popular. In other words, people experience Microsoft bugs very often, not because Microsoft software is unusually bad, but because Microsoft’s software is unusually prevalent in the world.
Windows, instead, absolutely routinely crashed every day, or even several times a day. A few people managed to keep it up for days between crashes. It would crash even when you weren't using it.
I had an Apple A/UX system that stayed up for months at a stretch. That was simply normal for Unix, and later Linux. Even in the mid '90s it was expected that a Linux system would be rebooted only after you deliberately shut it down to upgrade to a new release or install new gadgets. (This was before there was USB.)
Microsoft ended up redefining crashing to mean, not just needing to reboot, but failing to reboot so you would need to re-install the OS, because something got corrupted on disk. It was totally normal and expected to need to reinstall Windows every few weeks or, sometimes, months, and everyone got used to that.
Microsoft worked fine for the actual customers, the system integrators, because all it needed to do was install and register. Once the system was delivered to their customer, software failures were Somebody Else's Problem, and did not affect the actual customer.
Economically speaking, software failure costs were exported to the hapless users, who were not sophisticated enough to blame anybody, and not in a position to demand satisfaction from anybody.
Not so much awful as "Star Trek."
Star Trek was always upheld as a model of the future. But instead of transporters and replicators and space travel, we got all the bad stuff from Star Trek.
Everything breaks all the time. Technology doesn't do what we expect it to do. The latest, greatest inventions are held together with gum and bailing wire. Computers let us down when we need them the most.
We are living Star Trek.
Big difference. One is a purpose built machine, the other is an app on your multi-purpose computer.
And is pleased when it isn’t.
If you're telling me there are ships running in the defence force that can't actually communicate with other people at the drop of a hat, at all times, then how is that even possible? That requires some serious negligence.
In a lot of instances, if the system fails, the plane falls out of the sky, so I am pretty sure we're doing that well.
Indeed it does, but unfortunately ships have to be designed to constraints other than, "Works perfectly all the time, even in combat." For example, one of the reasons that the British lost HMS Sheffield during the Falklands War is because, due to issues with her antenna layout, she was unable to use her radar and satellite communications at the same time. When the Argentine planes launched an Exocet at her, she was in the middle of using the satellite antenna, and thus missed the incoming missile. Why was the antenna layout so boneheaded? Budget cuts during the shipbuilding program, which forced a reduction in size and consolidation of antennas.
In a lot of instances, if the system fails, the plane falls out of the sky, so I am pretty sure we're doing that well.
The numerous issues we've had with communication and sensor fusion on the F-35 indicate that we aren't. Now, the military absolutely assures us that those issues have been resolved and the F-35 is great now, but I think I can be forgiven for not taking their word 100% at face value.