Windows 8?

[Hielor]

there is no way MS could afford to completely test the product before coming to market, so they don't. they realise an-almost-finished version that, in construction terms, is like the builder selling you a house with a tarpaulin roof; it'll keep the rain out, but thats about it.

everytime we send back the statistics about crashes etc to ms, it helps to improve their next product which we will benefit from in time/gives them advanced real-world testing data for free*
*please delete as appropriate

Fun fact: there are about as many testers working on Windows 8 as there are developers. That's the Microsoft division of labor: Product Managers come up with designs, Software Development Engineers(SDEs) write the code, and Software Development Engineers in Test (SDETs) write more code that nobody outside the company ever sees which validates the product code.

Not unique to Microsoft, either--fairly common way of doing things nowadays. Do things get missed? Probably. Is it because Microsoft employees are lazy and terrible? No--it's because there are as many different combinations of computer hardware and software as there are computer owners, and obviously not every scenario can be tested exhaustively.

Crash reports are actually extremely useful--not just the report itself, but also the scope of the problem. If you have a million installed computers and a dozen instances of a crash, that'll get prioritized below a crash that has several thousand hits a day.

And trust me--what ends up going out the door is a whole lot better and more stable than the stuff that nobody outside ever gets to see.

Occasionally required disclosure: yes, I work for Microsoft. However, anything in this post is my personal opinion and does not reflect blah blah blah blah etc.