This is pretty old. But I really agree with it.
“What’s fundamentally wrong is that nobody ever had any taste when they did it. Microsoft has been very much into making the user interface look good, but internally it’s just a complete mess. And even people who program for Microsoft and who have had years of experience, just don’t know how it works internally. Worse, nobody dares change it. Nobody dares to fix bugs because it’s such a mess that fixing one bug might just break a hundred programs that depend on that bug. And Microsoft isn’t interested in anyone fixing bugs — they’re interested in making money. They don’t have anybody who takes pride in Windows 95 as an operating system.
People inside Microsoft know it’s a bad operating system and they still continue obviously working on it because they want to get the next version out because they want to have all these new features to sell more copies of the system.
The problem with that is that over time, when you have this kind of approach, and because nobody understands it, because nobody REALLY fixes bugs (other than when they’re really obvious), the end result is really messy. You can’t trust it because under certain circumstances it just spontaneously reboots or just halts in the middle of something that shouldn’t be strange. Normally it works fine and then once in a blue moon for some completely unknown reason, it’s dead, and nobody knows why. Not Microsoft, not the experienced user and certainly not the completely clueless user who probably sits there shivering thinking “What did I do wrong?” when they didn’t do anything wrong at all.
That’s what’s really irritating to me.”
— Linus Torvalds, from an interview with BOOT Magazine, Sept 1998
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