A living example of intervention by a blog that wouldn’t happen as fast or as publicly any other way.
From FeedDemon’s Blog to Microsoft
Nick Bradbury is the founder of the company that created FeedDemon an RSS feeder that aggregates and carries blog content to blog readers. He knows his stuff. This is from his blog Friday.
Friday, June 09, 2006
Microsoft, Please Fix this WinINet Bug!
Recently a few FeedDemon users reported CPU spiking when updating their feeds. After finding a feed which triggered the problem, I debugged my code and discovered that the CPU spike was actually happening in Microsoft’s WinINet.dll (a Windows library which provides Internet-related functions). Specifically, the CPU load was jumping during a call to InternetReadFile – and the load never decreased the whole time FeedDemon was running. Not good. . . .
But I am going to criticize them for how long this bug has remained unfixed. The KB article is dated October 2, 2003, so they’ve officially known about this bug for almost three years. This is a serious bug – it causes applications to stop responding or over-utilize the CPU, leading to crashes or decreased performance. In other words, this bug makes Windows developers look bad.
Microsoft, please fix this bug. You ship WinINet.dll with Internet Explorer, so you could include the fix with IE7. Windows developers need to know that they can rely on your APIs, and long-standing critical bugs in your APIs make us leery of relying on you.
Update: I just confirmed that this bug still exists in Windows Vista Beta 2.
Just one day later, yesterday. The problem has been responded to and a major customer has new feeling about Microsoft. Here is Nick’s post.
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Thanks, Microsoft
Yesterday I got cranky with Microsoft about a long-standing bug in a Microsoft library that was causing problems for some FeedDemon customers. As you can imagine, I was frustrated that my work was being compromised by a known bug in code I had no control over, so I was feeling a little punchy when I posted yesterday.
Of course, I hoped that posting about the bug would get it the attention it deserved (which it did, btw). But I didn’t think about how my cranky post would affect the Microsoft devs responsible for tackling the bug (yes, folks, they are human!). I know it’s no fun to wake up and find some blogger just made your day harder.
As you can see from the comments to my post, Microsoft is on the ball – they jumped in, asked for more information, and reactivated the bug after being able to reproduce it. I have to agree with Andy Herron that Microsoft’s reaction was impressive. So, thanks for taking my criticism in the way it was intended and for taking the time to look into the problem. I look forward to seeing this bug fixed 
Is the problem solved? Not yet. But the customer relationship is back on track. What was a customer wondering how a company could leave a bug unattended for so long is now a customer who feels attended to in record time.
That is the power of the blog.
You’ll notice that Nick didn’t go to Microsoft. They came to Nick’s blog. The world is changing. Customers are talking whether we care to listen is our call.
Liz Strauss
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Thanks, Microsoft
