Black Screen of Death

While the "blue screen of death" has made it into the IT failure and quality vocabulary, could we see a new addition - a colour change perhaps!

In Computerworld article, "Microsoft denies blame for black screens of death" (2 Dec 2009). User have claimed that November windows updates have caused lock outs of users' PCs.

Microsoft have denied claims, and investigation of failure reports have found that none of the behaviour is related to that its November Windows updates are causing a widespread "black screen" lock-out of users' PCs. Furthermore technical support have not seen this as a broad customer issue.

Microsoft have some extraordinary approaches to configuration and patch testing. It is a huge challenge when you consider the miriad of configurations and applications dependencies that exist. In the whole scheme of things I think they have done a good job in recent years, and a testament that we dont see these kinds of problems proliferating every day.

While most of us have experienced the "blue screen of death" and enjoyed the quality awareness that this colourful metaphor has raised. From the article, it sounds like a widespread mutant of the term is not yet ready to surface???