To celebrate the release of Windows 2000, today's theme is products that crash, fail and generally let us down. Of course Windows 2000 is supposed to have none of those flaws. Yet when Windows 98 came out, it was presented as the highly refined, much more stable replacement for the overly crash-prone Windows 95. And when Windows 95 made its debut, amid advertising and sloganeering worthy of a presidential campaign, it was depicted as the near-miraculous answer to the prayers of anyone unhappy with Windows 3.11. But it also reveals something deeper about the circumstances in which customers will and will not accept unreliable performance, which in turn has consequences for the Internet.
People are famously irrational in deciding what hazards to pay attention to.
But when a big plane goes down, there are big stories - which we all read. Residents of Los Angeles or San Francisco are hundreds of times more likely to die in a household fall from a ladder than in an earthquake, yet the earthquake danger is what people are hundreds of times more likely to discuss. Our reaction to these different perils is both not quite logical and completely understandable, since we are affected by more than the pure statistical risk. A less dramatic version of this subjective risk assessment helps explain the market's tolerance for some kinds of high-tech failures and its acute sensitivity to others. Among modern inventions, by far the least reliable is the cell phone.