Chas: got a cite for sig factoid?

[Charles Martin]

> Subject: [P1] Chas:  got a cite for sig factoid?
>
> Got a source, hopefully web-available, for this little
> news-you-can-use?

I can't find my original citation, from whence I also derived my 
numbers, but the original source was a widely-reported story in the New 
York Times around the end of July that said that Bill Gates had 
acknowledged that the company's own automatic crash-reporting system 
showed that around 5% of their machines crash MORE than twice per day.

This is actually a rather shallow way to discover these numbers, since 
only those Windows machines that are hooked to the net and running a 
relatively new version of the OS (I think Win98 or higher) are 
included. If you believe MS's estimates that 600 million machines run 
some version of Windows, then 5% is 30 million, which is simply 
astonishing. More people have extremely unstable/unreliable Windows 
machines than ALL the people who have Mac machines!!

Here's a good source that reports the original story and gives analysis:
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2003/07/25.6.shtml

_Chas_

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates recently admitted that approximately 30 
million Windows customers experience crashes more than three times a 
day.