Hi Walter,

>Hi Doug,
>
>>Well, look.. When you figure out how to convince a company that has been successful enough in the marketplace to bank some 40 billions of dollars that their policies need to change please let me know. <g>
>
>That might be easier than you think. The VFP team has shown that they're willing to listen to our wishes and complaints in the past. Like the VFP has expressed before is that the community makes the future of VFP, why can't we submit an ER about a more advanced bugreporting facility ? However, to reach this goal we should all stand together and express our discomfort about the bug report facility as it exists today. People who are saying "it won't happen, because...." are not beeing constructive and are putting their head into the sand. If at some point the market requires a better bugreport handling, MS is forced to do so. Esspecially with the new .NET framework, there are a lot of big companies running on SUN/JAVA who only want to move to .NET if this path is steady. Running into BUGs is bad enough, but running into a BUG and not getting any feedback about the current state of the BUG report is far worse.

Well, here's what I don't understand... If everyone wants to make the product better and make the community better and so forth then all this boils down to is a difference of opinion on how best to reach the various goals. IOW, it's not about the goals, just a few of the methods. Well, given that those at Microsoft want to do what's best then I am of the opinion that I can safely presume that they understand the concern of some in the community about how bugs are reportd. However, as we have bene tols many many times over the years there are resaons they (Fox Software & Microsoft) have consciously determined and decided that the path they've chosen is the best.

You see, I trust these people. Everything I have seen eminating from them has been driven by a desire to be the best. I think I'm safe to make the same presumption regarding their decisions on how best to deal with the bug issue. I understand others think and feel differently and I'm comfortable with that. I just take issue with what seems to be a not-so-subtle insinuation that because Microsoft hasn't acted the way some would like them to act that it is axiomatically acting with ill intent.


>
>>Does anyone reading this honestly think that the developers of the several Microsoft products want so ship buggy software???
>
>No, no-one does, but this is not the issue. We accept that there are bugs in the product, However, we do not accept the way that bugreports are handled.
>
>>Or that they do not want to fix said bugs as quickly s is humanly possible?
>
>I'm not sure they are. For instance you could hire more people to make this possible. This of course has some negative financial consequenses, to MS and eventually to us, as we buy new products from MS.
>
>>Does anyone think that the developers at MSFT don't get frustrated when they are told that there's no ROI benefit on fixing some obscure bugs? How would you feel if someone told you that you needed to leave those few bugs in your software because it needed to ship? I wouldn't like it one bit but I'm not a businessman who's responsible for the jobs of the other 40,000 employees; I'm a developer who likes to think he can write good code and more than likely a lousy businessman. <s> Sad to say but there really are reasons for these things...
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>Of course there are, but therefore we must give MS reasons to change this. One way of doing this, is expressing our feelings about the current policy.
>
>Walter,