in fairness: almost as funny as rating bug-openness by doing a cursory search for "bug" on the main home page (!?) is the following quote in the section where they reviewed microsoft:

-- You'll get 200 hits if you search on "bug" on Microsoft's vast online Knowledge Base, which is like searching the Arctic for snowflakes and finding 200. --

Where's my barf bag?

This is too unreal. A search on the keyword 'bugs' to determine how a company treats "reporting" of bugs in it's products? Was some reporter bored?

Is MSNBC just turning into 'The Onion'? I thought it was bad enough that MS partnered with them.

They didn't mention anything about http://bugzilla.mozilla.org thought.

Even thought its some what hard to use but its a good bug reporting tool.

Maybe the reason that "bug" shows up so few times on MS's Knowledge Base is because their products don't have "bugs"; they have "issues". I bet "issues" would show up a few more times.

I could understand this if they are just talking about communicator. Bugzilla is only for mozilla right??

Gee. . .In consideration of this sort of journalism by MSNBC, it makes me wonder how they gather information for other subjects they do stories on.

So, what qualifies for research on a news report about mobsters in America? Renting "The Godfather" from Blockbuster Video? =)

So let me get this straight -- they expect that someone who finds a problem or bug in the software they are using will go to the support section of the vendor's web site and search for "bug" AND expect to find something relevant.

My guess is that the high scoring companies in the review have something like "Bug #nnnn" on the top of each page.

Anyway, how does calling faults in the software bugs rather than problems affect the support anyway? I can see how calling them features might be a problem though :)

That's the most moronic fluff peice I've seen in a long time. MSNBC should be ashamed.

If you're gonna do crappy nonstories, at least get some kind of facts first...

This "article" (notice its a "commentary") is so mind-blowingly moronic that I felt several synapses short out in my brain as I read it. He needs his oxygen licence revoked.

This sounds like a tipical thing for Microsoft after how many other low stunts they have pulled time after time

go to the article, scroll to the bottom, and vote "1" or so..

best way to be heard, I guess. pffft.

This sounds like a tipical thing for Microsoft after how many other low stunts they have pulled time after time

Anybody know any lower grade.

M$: It's not a bug, it's an undocumented feature.

I give MSNBC an 'F' for having bugs in its research procedures...

MSNBC has found an interesting way to take advantage of the "MS" in their name. It's like this:

Say something unflattering about Microsoft, and then note that Microsoft is a partner in MSNBC. The reader, blinded by this incredible display of openness and honesty on the part of the writer, will then eat up anything the article says from that point on.

That is not good enough. Let them know this in the feedback options on the site, but please summon some politeness, even though they may not deserve it.

It is the same type of thing they did with the Mindcraft benchmarking. But... this has a twist. Since Netscape didn't return as many bugs then Netscape must be less buggy therefore a better product. If you look at it like I do. Well some more of M$ marketing comes to play again. What will they come up with next?

They weren't looking hard enough. I must say that althouhg http://www.microsoft.com/ isn't a "bug" -site, finding information there is harder than any other page.

sure it's a stupid article, but seriously, the possibility of finding anything at all on netscape.com has gone way down since they turned the place into a portal.

Even though they gave Microsquish a "C-" if look at the user poll it ranks MS the worst in dealing with bugs.

CJ

I am curious about this. First, the author is from Bugnet, an organization that gives annual awards for fixing software bugs. This last year no award was given out because they felt no company had done an adequate job of fixing their bugs. The year before (1997) Adobe go the award.

Now, they rank some of the biggest names in the industry and nearly all get an "f". Yet, Corel which has been hemorraghing money for years gets an "a-". Huh? So the moneymakers get a low grade for not admitting to software bugs and the losers get a good grade? Is there some correlation here? Maybe you shouldn't admit to problems if you want to make money?

Also I can definetely see giving Netscape (not Mozilla - which I didn't see in the whole article) an F. I don't know how many times I have gone to netscape.com looking for how to overcome/confirm some bug in Communicator only to be thwarted by bad search results (404 results) or poor navigation. Heck, they still haven't updated CSS issues since 4.00 PR3! And this was what, 2.5 years ago?! And it's been moved at least once as I got a 404 error and had to email the webmaster to actually find the piece again. Not exactly encouraging to developers like myself that need that information.

I'll be the first to admit that searching for "bug" is a very questionable mehtod, but I don't see any legitimacy for equating Mozilla to Netscape in that otherwise tawdry article. This looks like a hack piece done by bugnet, which really ruins there reputation in my eyes.

--Luddite (who cannot login to post, but somehow can login and change my user info)

Luddite -

Since when does how much money a company makes an indication of how good they are at bug fixing/acknowledging?

Besides, Corel is back to profitability, and the new version of Wordperfect is light years better than MSO2000.

Now before you attack, by my sheer existance at this site, I'm obviously a fan of moz, and like most fans, not to great with microsoft. However, I seriously disagree with those of you who pull microsoft as a conspiracy in an MSNBC news story. MSNBC rates right up there with fox news with me, but just because it has MS in the name doesn't mean microsoft has a hand in it's dealings. Common sense should tell you that MSNBC has editorial rights away from microsoft, and that they probably don't have anyone to answer to there about such decisions as rating a 'c-' or a 'f' to certain companies. Not to mention that it doesn't sound like a particularly intelligent staffer did this, or that a particularly large amount of work went into it. If microsoft does something, we all should know, it's a gala affair with every available resource pulled in. This is just a stupid writer, and it's really silly to bring in the MS part of the thing into this. I'm sure they don't want to ruin their cred, and it doesn't take a brilliant person to make the connection, so I be they stay on their toes for this stuff.

Also, if this were vindiction, wouldn't they be anti-everyone but microsoft, because microsoft is in competition with every single one of those companies.

"And, of course, being a MS-run site, they give Netscape an F because they couldn't find bugzilla."

No, they couldn't find bugzilla because it's not part of the Netscape site. All this time it's been pushed that mozilla.org is separate from Netscape. The unfortunate thing is that most readers probably will not make this distinction.

Their research methods are certainly questionable. And the article is supposedly about bug REPORTING -- and whilst Netscape at least gives you a talkback form to fill out when it crashes, MS, Adobe, Corel etc products don't. This should have earned a few more points for NS, but thats all IMHO anyway....

And, dammit, you people are FAR too critical of Microsoft! They don't have bugs, they have features. The BSOD, for example -- when you've been slaving over a thesis for three long hours, and click on "save", it's a GOOD THING that a nice calming blue screen comes up to take your mind off work, isn't it =)

-=Yusuf=-, who ranks Win95 as one giant bug...

Actually, Corel hasn't necessarily dropped Macintosh as a platform for WordPerfect Office.... They just haven't decided yet whether to provide a new version or not. The latest version of the product, Corel WordPerfect 3.5 Enhancement Pack, will be available for free download for Mac users on August 16. In addition, new consumer graphics programs for Mac are under development. No announcement has been made either way on the possibility of a new WordPerfect for Mac.... They just say that they won't develop on the 3.5 code base anymore (which is a very good thing, as it's antiquated).

MozillaZine's forums are now threaded, so if you want to respond to a post, click "Reply to this message" in the message's header. That will lead you to a new page with a response submission form.

I know, but I browse `em in flat mode (I prefer having all the messages on the screen at once), so there's no reply button. :)

Everybody seems to have missed the point of the article. It's not talking about bug reporting systems like Bugzilla. It's talking about which companies are willing to use the _word_ "bug" to describe errors in their products and which companies prefer to dance around the "issue." That said, basing the score on a single word is probably misleading as far as determining which companies acknowledge their responsibility for the quality (or lack thereof) of their software.

Hmmm, I always use flat mode here and never have any trouble posting.

I will agree with the article on one point: Corel's "issues" listings are very good indeed. I had major problems with one of their products (CorelDraw) on my Windows box, and I was able to find a solution within about 15 minutes of hitting their site.

Otherwise, the story was a complete piece of trash -- when I was in the news biz, if I'd tried to pass something like this off as "research", I'd have been canned in a heartbeat. And rightly so.

Once MS delivers IE 5 for the Mac and UNIX, Netscape will die. Too bad Netscape is still about a year way :(

IE 5 for the Mac won't have a big impact. Mac users are still pretty sore about what Microsoft's done to them over the years (and is now just getting back to doing, according to a news.com article from today).

And don't even start about IE 5 for Unix.... It's got about three features. It installs, it starts, it crashes. :)

And Netscape is about 6 months away, not a year. Beta's due in a month or two, not 6.

I see a huge need for industry standards on syntax to be used in software knowledge bases. I don't know that "bug" is the word I'd choose for that particular category of information, but I would like to see a standard adopted, perhaps a "software knowledge base" document type definition for XML/SGML?

Ditto for search engine boolean syntax. It's a pain having to figure it out everywhere you go, and far too few sites offer any explanation. For example, I had to lobby Corel for months to put up a Help link for their knowledge base so casual users would have a clue instead of automatically swamping the newsgroups. They finally put it up a couple of weeks ago, and it's missing half the command set I know works on their search engine! And still no information for newbies on how to search for a particular error message.

mailto:pem@televar.com

OFF-TOPIC POST:

I always use flat mode, I find threaded mode monotonous, slow, and inefficient. It would probably be a good thing to have a poll of how many people actually USE threaded mode, and if it's less than 5% or so (which I suspect it is), lets just get rid of it and move on to flat mode.

-=Yusuf=-, Off-Topic Poster '99

I find a large number of MSNBC stories often fail to load properly under Linux/Netscape 4.6. Usually what happens is that the top teaser loads, and then it doesn't auto-load the full article underneath those mid-level ads. It's usually Javascript bugs (bugs in their Javascript code) and it seems random... some stories have the problem, others don't. IE always loads the story fine. Feedback to MSNBC never gets anywhere, they don't reply and they don't fix the problem.

Anyone else see this? And if it's deliberate, what to do?

Has MSNBC taken heed of the above subject? Try searching for "bug" or the hyperlink for the article, and !bang! nothing. This is even with "bug" three times in the title of the article!

Mr Baggins,

I couldn't find that news.com article you mentioned. You don't have a url handy, do ya?

Wish I did, but I deleted the news.com report containing it.... It was about Gates saying that they could easily pound the iMac into the dirt (or something equivalent in meaning)....

Let's see... The guy spends, at most, an hour visiting a few web sites and does a search on the word "bug." Then he spends maybe 15 minutes writig pithy comments and pulling letter grades out of thin air.

Emails the story to the editor & attaches the following note "Ed- here's the story I've been working on for the past week." Then he gets a nice paycheck.

Sounds like he's got a nice scam going.