Why Microsoft fixes YOUR bugs

The recent article from Joel is an eye-opener. It walks you through a mini-history lesson as to how Microsoft won the desktop. Among other things, he shows how MS will go down-the-hill because of the current trend for the adaptation of Web based apps over Win32 apps. The theory is simple; Microsoft will no longer be able to hold on to desktops if all future applications are made to run on any Web Browser. Joel suddenly became the hero-of-the-month for the Slashdot crowd.

While the Linux zealots jumped around fantasizing about winning the desktop, I was more impressed by the work Microsoft has done to make their win. For example, how much work they have done to make Windows backward compatible. Quoting Joel:

"SimCity had a critical bug: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away.

The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.

People complain Microsoft can't fix their own bugs, they fix other's bugs too DAMN IT!!