Hey, you-- are you running Mac OS X? Yeah? Okay, so when was the last time you experienced a flat-out system crash, like one of those funky multilingual kernel panics or a screen freeze that didn't thaw until you held down the power key and gave your Mac a happy little rest? Odds are, you're having a tough time recalling, because in our experience, at least, Mac OS X is stabler than a three-legged ottoman Krazy-Glued to the floor and pumped full of lithium.

And all those NT-derived flavors of Windows are supposed to be rock-solid, too, right? You remember the spiel: "with Windows XP, crashes are now a thing of the past," yadda yadda yadda. And pretty much everything we've heard about XP is that it is, indeed, a whole lot more stable than Windows 95 and its descendants. Of course, Windows 95 crashed hard enough to leave a smoking crater if you so much as blinked too hard three rooms down the hall, so that's not necessarily saying much. Still, we had been led to believe that even though XP and its ilk were decidedly behind in the categories of looks, ease of use, and human interface that doesn't make you want to drive a pickaxe through the base of your own skull, those modern Windows systems were at least on par with Mac OS X in the stability department.

Well, apparently we done been lied to. Oh, the betrayal...

See, faithful viewer Mike Scherer informed us of a European study of over 1.2 million Wintels in the workplace deployed across seven different countries, which apparently sought to study office computer work habits or something like that, and as a nifty side benefit wound up with some handy stats about Windows reliability. The results have been translated and presented over at The Mac Observer, and they paint a somewhat less rosy picture of Windows stability than society at large had pulled over our eyes: reportedly these 1.2 million Windows PCs "crashed around 8% per session." That may not sound too bad, especially since we're way too lazy to pick through the French to try and find out exactly what constitutes a "session," but TMO's reasonable interpretation is that "Windows PCs crash almost one out of every 12 times they are turned on." Feeling lucky, punk?

Oh, but wait, it gets even better: apparently the failure rate of just Windows XP is "closer to 12%" in a given session, which implies that if you were to spend a morning in an office with nine XP systems chugging away, chances are at least one of them would be wearing a pretty blue screen before everyone broke for lunch down at Bennigan's. Can that really be right? Because that still sounds suspiciously high to us; granted, we have almost zero contact with XP (hence our hearty appetites, full heads of thick, lustrous hair, and complete and utter lack of Dr. Kevorkian's phone number in our speed dial entries), but can people really be touting the reliability of an operating system with a 12% crash rate? Is this supposed to be good?

Maybe something important is getting lost in the translation, or perhaps Europeans just do really bad and awful things to their computers. But if the 12% crash rate is correct and over 90% of the computer-using world really has standards that low, suddenly it becomes a lot clearer how Rob Enderle passes for an "analyst" and Paul Thurrott can call himself a "journalist." So maybe it's not so far-fetched after all.