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Comment by sitharus | Hacker News Reader

Really? Name one non open-source company that will jump on forum threads and fix it, rather than just putting it in their internal bug tracker to investigate.

I have a Logitech gaming keyboard. Their drivers are shockingly bad and freeze up every so often requiring me to re-plug the keyboard to get them to to work again. This is mentioned in the forums for at least 6 months, no fix has been announced.

I'm not defending Apple here, they should at least comment on their own forums, but they're not alone.

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Back in the day, when there was no internet (only the arpanet) and Unix systems shipped with 10 manuals in nicely bound cases (I had one I was in my 20's at the time) things moved much slower and a vendor would never consider acting like this because they served primarily business customers (and institutions). Just the memory on my first Unix system was like $4000 a MB. It came with a 70mb hard disk.

To me the change most likely came around 1981 when the IBM PC came out and was sold to consumers who basically believed that it was them that was stupid and not something wrong with the machine. Manufacturers then learned that they could shove things into the pipeline and fix them later and that they actually got a fair amount of slack in the marketplace from the "stupid" end users. People who knew their shit using these machines were totally outnumbered by computer illiterate people. In other cases the ubiquitous "tech guy" made money because things didn't work so who was he to complain? That's what kept Microsoft in power. The tech guy ecosystem.

I'm curious if anyone else agrees at all with my take. Strictly my opinion having been around computers so many years.

It really depends on the number of customers.

If you have 1 million $10 customers and 10,000 have a problem the cost of losing their business isn't amazingly huge, especially as most of them probably won't switch vendors.

When you have ten $1,000,000 customers you might listen more if one has a problem.

Microsoft are much better than Apple at this, heck just look the latest fixed on connect.

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/8...

I've had issues which I've posted in newsgroups and forums, that have been turned into bug tickets.

Some teams appear better at this than others mind.

Yet you can still do this and hang Visual Studio 2012, and maybe 2013:

* On a new machine (or maybe a new profile, I haven't checked), enable PowerShell's AllSigned option

* Open Visual Studio and open an MVC4 project, bonus points if it's close to the template in terms of installed NuGet packages

* Watch as Visual Studio hangs indefinitely.

This has been reported a number of times to Microsoft, but I don't think it was fixed in Update 4.

What's happening is PowerShell, running inside Visual Studio is prompting for something to do with a signed PowerShell Script, but Visual Studio hasn't loaded enough of the UI to let you accept the warning/prompt.

As a .NET developer, I can confirm this is the case with VS 2013.

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