Well, the word is out,

February 14, 2000 7:04 AM

Well, the word is out, Windows 2000 ships this Thursday and, with it, approximately 63,000 bugs. The spokespeople are saying:

"All software ships with issues. The difference is (that) no software in the history of Microsoft development has ever been through the incredible, rigorous internal and external testing that Windows 2000 has been through."

While that's great and all, they didn't say they actually fixed the bugs that those 750,000 people found. I certainly won't be switching anytime soon.
posted by othermatt (8 comments total)

I wonder how true it really is though?
Is it just more swiping at Microsoft for the hell of it (ie, they're the obvious bad guy) or are there genuinely 63,000 bugs?
posted by tomcosgrave at 7:16 AM on February 14, 2000

According to the memo quoted in the article,

"Our customers do not want us to sell them products with over 63,000 potential known defects. They want these defects corrected," stated one of Microsoft's Windows development leaders.

I'm glad to see Microsoft has the same vision and insight we've always expected from them.
posted by sixfoot6 at 7:23 AM on February 14, 2000

Hence, the Service Pack doth follow.
posted by othermatt at 3:03 PM on February 14, 2000

Well, good or evil, I can tell you that *if* you're already running any other version of Windows, you might consider the upgrade anyway. I ran the Win2K beta on my primary workstation for about four months and have been running the final version on this and one of our servers for about a month, and I've been rather pleased with the increased stability (over Win9x on the workstation) and performance (over NT4 on the server).
posted by evhead at 4:13 PM on February 14, 2000

I'd like to point out some statistics in Microsoft's defense.

Software programs average 1 bug for every ten lines of code written. Last I heard Windows 2000 was over 10 million lines of code. Therefore:

10,000,000 code lines * (1 bug / 10 code lines) = 1,000,000 bugs

Now, consider that they have approximately 63,000 bugs according to the ZDNet story:

63,000 bugs / 1,000,000 potential bugs = 6.3% of total potential bugs

Industry standard for bugs fixed before release is around 90.0%. Windows 2000 stands around 95.7%.

Software is never going to be perfect. That's what service packs are for. But according to the numbers Windows 2000 appears to be well within the 90% bug-fix tolerance that signals readiness for an initial release.
posted by vitaminb at 5:51 AM on February 15, 2000

Oops. That should be 93.7%. So much for my proof-reading skills.
posted by vitaminb at 5:52 AM on February 15, 2000

10,000,000 lines of code? I'm no PC programmer, but that's a huge amount of code, whatever happened to K.I.S.S?
posted by Markb at 3:34 AM on February 16, 2000

I just read in a Reuters release that Windows 2000 is consists of over 30,000,000 lines of code.

That puts the "bugs fixed before release" percentage at 97.9%.

So maybe the functionality works. But is it usable? And is it what users want in the first place?
posted by vitaminb at 6:01 AM on February 17, 2000