>I don't think you give enough credit to the auto industry and where it has come from to where it is today. It has, after all, been around for about 100 years. There has been tremendous progress. I see it in my mere 40 years of observing it.

Right, its been around a hundred years. Thats quite a while compared to personal computers. Here's some thoughts, if Chevy wanted to know how a Ford door lock worked, what would they do? Buy the car, and take apart the lock. So a hundred years of that sort of sharing, and there's no doubt that things will get fixed rather quickly. You can't really do that with Windows, or Internet Explorer. How about this, when Toyota designs a car, do you think they sit down and say, if someone wanted to put the motor from a Honda in this thing, will this be compatible? Or, will this car be able to share information with the car wash without any problems? While I'm driving, can I disconnect my dash. and plug another one in knowing that it will work?

>In addition, the two products (cars versus software) are radically different. BUT just because nobody's gonna get killed by malfunctioning Win systems or their apps doesn't mean that QUALITY can be thrown overboard! What poor quality does is show disregard for customers, and that is a serious problem in any business.

There's really no way to measure quality though, thats what I'm saying. I think that the software should be measured in quality by how much time it saves you, IOW, how useful it is. So one minor flaw might set you back a little bit, but its still going to be very valuable software.

>I'd bet that, considering all aspect of a car's production versus a software product, the car is a far far more complex undertaking. To claim that Win having tens of millions of lines of code excuses it from good quality is, in my humble opinion, an error.

I don't excuse it from good quality, I simply understand that a product that complex will never be absolutlely perfect, and when mistakes happen with code (its not like buying a hammer that wasn't put together right), I understand, and accept the company's offer to fix it, free of charge. I think that writing an OS would be harder, and not by a little bit.