All software developers are indebted to Microsoft

Sometime back, a client wrote to me that something
in an application we had developed wasn’t working right. As it worked
out, the issue wasn’t one of our creation, however it surely had affected
the client’s business.

I tried to empathize with the client and figure out how he could stay cool even
when things weren’t working right.
The answer came quickly and it’s strange that I did not see this
before.

All the credit goes to Microsoft.

Microsoft products have made even non techie users accept that software
cannot be perfect and that bugs and crashes will happen. The software
will do marvellous things for you but it will crash. If there’s a
Murphy’s law for software, maybe it is "All software will crash.."

What if Windows was never created/ What if l humans had been used to using a rock solid OS? What if your PC never did anything unexpected?

It would surely be a different world today. For one, software users would not have been as tolerant to bugs as they are these days. So developers would have had to create ‘perfect’ software.

However maybe there would have been far less bugs in the first place, because everybody would have been so used to making and using perfect software.

Anyway, bugs are a reality and most developers accept them as a part of life. I have generally found that people who say that "The software has to be perfect and bugs will not be tolerated" are those who have not coded and whose neck isn’t on the line.

So the next time you as a Java developer look down on Microsoft or blame it for creating buggy software, think of its tremendous contribution to making a developer’s life less stressful. Actually, even Microsoft products seem to have improved a lot lately. Win 95 and 98 would crash
with amazing regularity, however later versions are far better.