Infinite State

What we need is a site where people post errors generated by commercial applications — no comments, just errors. The system maintains counts by product, host OS, date range, and you can see how applications scored before buying. With a large enough sample size, the results should be indicative of the broader stability and quality of support. Better products should generate fewer errors, and when they do their customer service and tech support should enable customers to get fixes in place to reduce future errors.

I’ve wondered if all those messages that Outlook 2003 sends off to Microsoft each time it crashes are actually being counted at all. Do they accumulate in some overloaded SQL Server 2003 database, deep in a Redmond basement? Does some Office VBA code choke on them? Or is there an Excel 2003 spreadsheet somewhere pulling rollups and calculating when to offer the next release upgrade to a primed and frustrated customer base?

When Windows/Office XP’s built-in speech recognition stopped working a few months ago (following some unidentified Windows Update), I gave up on it and went back to the keyboard. My wife’s RSI hasn’t improved enough for that, though, so I switched her to Dragon’s NaturallySpeaking. In the beginning, it looked great for her, and she found it even better on a lot of things. But recently, it’s been throwing Application Errors (DSXWarning_UttsPurged) for which I can find no explanation or even a reference on Google or ScanSoft’s site.

The ultimate insult is that there’s no way to email a question to tech support without paying a $10 fee (they do allow one incident free). Telephone? Forget it, more $$$. How about even a crummy public forum? Nope. If I worked for them, I’d be embarassed. I had bought a copy for myself recently but haven’t opened it yet and I’m seriously considering sending it back.

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