vnunet.com comment: Bill Gates powers down

4. 'Version Three' syndrome
While Microsoft has done very well with 'good enough' code. the rest of us have had to suffer through some real turkeys.

This problem has bedevilled the company right from the get go, as anyone who used DOS 2, 4 or the dire Microsoft Bob will know. But as the company's dominance grew so these programs became much more widely used and thus much more painful.

The problem is that because of Microsoft's market position users just had to suffer through and pray the developers could pull it together next time. It led to what I call Microsoft's 'Version Three' syndrome.

Version one is a toe in the water; Microsoft puts out a product just to say it was in the market and to scare off the competition.

Version two deals with the major flaws in version one and it's not until version three that you get anything really usable.

This might sound cynical but look at the evidence. Windows 1.0 was, in my opinion, a dog of a system and its second iteration not much better.

It wasn't until Windows 3.0 that we got something that was actually possible to use without cursing the developers at Redmond. The same pattern was repeated with Windows 95, Windows 95B and Windows 98.

Similarly Windows CE, known to many simply as WinCE for the emotions it aroused, took until version three to be well designed enough to be usable and power friendly enough to be practical, and some say it's still not there yet.