Broken trust
by Volker Weber
Sometimes, Bill Gates' timing is not so good.
Worldcom announces that it overestimated the year's earnings by $3.8 billion. Xerox says it goofed, too, inflating the past five years' revenues by $1.9 billion (and it's such a small number, compared to the Worldcom debacle, that hardly anyone notices). Enron's vaunted revenues turned out to be nothing more than a house of cards. Does anyone trust big corporations anymore?
As if that weren't enough, here's another reason to hate big companies, particularly those that develop bloated, buggy software: A new study shows that software bugs costs us nearly $60 billion every year.
And yet, Microsoft wants you to entrust it with the safekeeping of your computer's processor, memory, and hard drive.
