From Bill Gates at PDC 2003:
One thing that's been amazing at Microsoft is the impact that our monitoring data has had on how we prioritize our software work. I'm sure you've all seen in Windows XP that whenever an application or the system malfunctions, you get the ability to send a report back to Microsoft.
We get a lot of those reports, and we've created very good data-management systems to go in and look at those things, and therefore understand what drivers aren't reliable.
We allow anyone who has an application that runs on Windows to sign up and get the reports that relate to their application, and we've got winqual.microsoft.com where people can do that.
Today we've seen a lot of that activity from the driver manufacturers, but we want to see even more at the application level so it gets us working together on anything where a user is not having a great experience.
With data from Microsoft Windows Error Reporting (WER), you can identify the most common real-world customer problems and quickly provide a solution to your customers. While customer support calls provide information about common issues, they do not always provide enough detail to debug the actual code. Further, support records indicate only those problems which prompted calls. Because it is much easier for users to submit an error report than to contact customer support, WER can provide a more comprehensive picture of the problems your customers are having. And because WER collects data at the point of failure, you can get a more detailed picture of what is going wrong.
You can take advantage of WER to investigate the most frequently reported software crashes, resolve the problems, and inform your customers of the fixes, establishing a strong feedback loop with your customers.
Broad-based trend analysis of error reporting data shows that across all the issues that exist on the affected Windows platforms and the number of incidents received:
| • | Fixing 20 percent of the top-reported bugs can solve 80 percent of customer issues. |
| • | Addressing 1 percent of the bugs would address 50 percent of the customer issues. |
The same analysis results are generally true on a company-by-company basis.
The data that WER provides can show you the product problems that are causing your customers the most serious problems.
WER data is available to software vendors, hardware vendors, and system manufacturers. Microsoft does not charge for using the service, and your products do not need to have the "Designed for Windows" logo in order to use the WER service. However, you will need a valid Winqual account and a VeriSign ID.
