Bill Gates is a schmuck…a very wealthy schmuck, but a schmuck nonetheless. He and his software company cannot create software that makes it difficult for other people to easily and maliciously fuck up. For some it maybe the inconvience of a website down (for example, this one) but for others, it means not being able to use their bank’s ATM machines. And the website down for the user like you and me is trivial except that there are other businesses that lose a lot of money when people cannot connect to it. It should be an important lesson in either economics or psychology how Microsoft has been able to sell gagillionzilliontrillion dollars on software that breaks down so much.
The problem is that software companies dupe their customers into thinking their software actually works. In reality, their software is much like a bleeding, dying corpse and it’s up to a (small) development team to either patch the wounds or just hope for the best in the next release. And the beauty of it all is that software companies actually charge their customers to fix their own product. I guess we’re too accustomed to buying cars and washing machines - we expect them to suck.