You may have seen the recent Infoworld article claiming that Access was
"rushed to market ... riddled with bugs," and that we have pulled the product
off the market or stopped manufacturing due to bugs.

These claims are untrue. Access was developed carefully over a 6-year period.
It has gone through rigorous internal testing and debugging, and an extensive
9-month beta test by over 3000 customers worldwide. All our data, along with
lots of customer feedback, says that Access is a very reliable and stable
product. We have had more than 7500 phone calls to Product Support and more
than 5000 messages posted on this forum. All of these calls and messages have
generated fewer than 20 bugs, none of which cause data corruption. (Before
Access shipped, we found two data corruption bugs that can occur when using
Access with Lan Manager and Windows for Workgroups. While these are not
actually bugs in Access itself, every single copy of Access we have shipped
includes documentation of the bugs and new drivers that fix these problems.)

We have not stopped manufacturing or pulled the product off the market, nor 
have we updated Access since its first release. We do have a backlog of
orders, however, because demand for Access is currently at three times the
level we forecasted. We have been working with our raw materials vendors to
meet the unexpected backlog, and have been able to ramp up manufacturing
dramatically over the last few weeks.  We expect to fill our current order
backlog by early January.

Our commitment to you as a database vendor is twofold: 1) to ship a stable,
reliable product that meets your needs; 2) to work closely with you to ensure
that Access continues to meet your needs over time. This commitment is not
limited to finding and fixing bugs.  We are very interested in your feedback
on potential feature improvements for future versions, and we view this forum
as an excellent way to gather your ideas, and provide you with feedback on our
plans.  And, of course, as you find any actual or suspected bug, we want to
hear about it right away.  Once we have identified a specific problem, whether
in Access or another product being used with Access, we will immediately 
provide you with information, workarounds and bug fixes, as appropriate. This
commitment includes working closely with third-party vendors to ensure that
Access works well with their products.

As we announced when Access was launched, we plan to post a bug list on this
forum, along with workarounds. You can expect to see this within the next few
days.

Access is a very innovative product. We are very proud of it and have put many
years of hard work into it. Along the way, we listened to your suggestions and
these helped make Access a better product. With your help, we will continue to
make Microsoft Access even better and better.

Thanks for your support.

Charles Stevens
General Manager
Microsoft Database and Programmability Group