Success has a thousand parents: failure is an orphan. This is the thinking behind most software's handling of error messages, where the worse the problem the more understated the report. Type something with mildly baroque grammar into a word processor, and helpful animated agents pop up suggesting remedies, tutorials, Web sites -- you name it. But if your multi-thousand-pound state-of-the-art PC is rendered just a box of sand by something really nasty deep in the heart of the operating system, you get a plain blue screen with a small pile of robot vomit in the middle. It has been pointed out that the Blue Screen Of Deathbot may be the only completely unbranded piece of software Microsoft has ever produced. You can't even skin it with a tasteful gravestone motif. Yet I come to praise Microsoft, not to bury it. One of the subtler innovations in XP and onwards has been automatic error reporting back to base. Provided you're on the Net, the sound of your application keeling over will now be heard as far as Redmond: your PC peers gloomily into the entrails of the dear departed, parcels up the remains and punts them off to the post-mortem android somewhere on the Microsoft campus. It's not just for show, either. Microsoft's Server 2003 kernel chief, Rob Short, has said that the information garnered from this mechanism has been invaluable in identifying the most important areas for debugging effort, and in sorting things out overall. Of course, Microsoft has solid commercial reasons for this -- but that shouldn't detract from the end result. Windows is now far more reliable than before. We can but hope that when the security improvements in Server 2003 ripple through to the desktop we'll finally have an operating system that you can shake a stick at without it fainting in fright. Of course, digital rights management will then mean that it'll refuse to do half the things we want it to do anyway, but let's not get glum. However, Microsoft is missing one important trick. On the surface, the remote error reporting is exemplary. It tells you what it's doing, lets you inspect the error, assures you that the report is completely anonymous, informs you about the progress of the transmission and doesn't get in the way of anything else you're trying to do. Proof, oh Linuxen and Mac people, that there are those in the belly of the Great Satan who know how -- and are allowed -- to do things right. Yet the final stage, when we can all see the global error list, is conspicuously missing. That is a Microsoft trade secret, and while it may choose to share reports of third-party misery with those third parties, it certainly doesn't go around letting anyone else know. Like, let's say, the people who actually pay money for the software in question.