This little piece of humour has been floating around on the internet for a while now, so apologies if you’ve seen it before, but I’m going to use it to illustrate a point.
At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If General Motors had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."
In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a manoeuvre such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.
Now, this probably isn’t a verbatim account of the exchange. In fact, it may never have happened at all. (See www.snopes.com for the likely origin of the tale.) However, as I say, I’ll use it to illustrate a point.
When you buy a can of Ronseal, “it does exactly what it says on the tin”. This phrase was used in the product’s advertising and was so appropriate that it quickly became part of the language.
The essence of the phrase is that it’s not unreasonable to expect any purchased product to work reliably and do what it’s supposed to do.
The computer industry has got away with disregarding this expectation by re-educating its customers to accept that things will often go wrong. And we’ve let them get away with it.
This is a problem for support engineers like me, because if a customer is irritated by a comparatively minor, but nonetheless annoying, glitch, it makes us look bad if we can’t fix it. Often, the best thing to do is to live with the problem. Now, I know you wouldn’t do this with any other product, but with computers, you sometimes have to.
Even the best maintained PCs will occasionally grind to a halt for no apparent reason. I know mine does. The fix is to turn it off and turn it on again. I’m a fairly intensive user, so this happens every now and again. It’s no big deal and I’ve learned to accept it.
But I remember how bemused I was when, in my early days of using a PC, the damn thing displayed things on the screen in a way that I knew it shouldn’t. I wondered what I was doing wrong, and it wasn’t until I read of other users with the same piece of software complaining of the same problem, that I realised that it wasn’t my fault after all. The manufacturers had simply released a product that was faulty. The fault wasn’t critical - it didn’t corrupt the data - it just sometimes looked a bit untidy and confusing on the screen. So we all ignored it, got on with our work and the manufacturers continued to sell it to other customers and make lots of money.
Of course, the faulty software should never have been sold in the first place. The programmers responsible for developing the product must have known that it wasn’t quite right, but my guess is that they were pressured by the company’s accountants into releasing it prematurely for the sake of the balance sheet. Eventually, after many complaints, the problem was fixed.
This way of working has become the norm in the software industry. After all, what better way is there of discovering the faults in your product than by getting your customers to do the product testing for you for free?
I’ll tell you a better way; it’s by getting your customers to do the product testing for you and charging them for the privilege. This is what the software industry does by selling flawed products and this is what, we the customers, have come to accept. Amazing, isn’t it?
There’s one rather large software company that seems more guilty of this than most. Almost as soon as it releases a new product, usually amidst lots of marketing hype, the bugs and security holes are discovered and exploited. In time, they’re fixed by the application of patches and service packs, which is fair enough, but wouldn’t it be nicer if the problems were resolved before the product was released in the first place? After all, we’re not usually aware that we need the product at all until we’re told we have to have it, so there’s really no rush.
I accept that this might be naive wish. With modern software being so frighteningly complex and the number of potential interactions with other manufacturers’ products being infinite, it can be argued that no company could possibly afford to employ enough people to test a product as thoroughly as millions of users worldwide would do by using it day-to-day.
Actually, I can think of one company that probably could afford it.
And it’s not General Motors.
© Philip Tattershall
April 2005
At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If General Motors had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."
In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a manoeuvre such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive -
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.
Now, this probably isn’t a verbatim account of the exchange. In fact, it may never have happened at all. (See www.snopes.com for the likely origin of the tale.) However, as I say, I’ll use it to illustrate a point.
When you buy a can of Ronseal, “it does exactly what it says on the tin”. This phrase was used in the product’s advertising and was so appropriate that it quickly became part of the language.
The essence of the phrase is that it’s not unreasonable to expect any purchased product to work reliably and do what it’s supposed to do.
The computer industry has got away with disregarding this expectation by re-
This is a problem for support engineers like me, because if a customer is irritated by a comparatively minor, but nonetheless annoying, glitch, it makes us look bad if we can’t fix it. Often, the best thing to do is to live with the problem. Now, I know you wouldn’t do this with any other product, but with computers, you sometimes have to.
Even the best maintained PCs will occasionally grind to a halt for no apparent reason. I know mine does. The fix is to turn it off and turn it on again. I’m a fairly intensive user, so this happens every now and again. It’s no big deal and I’ve learned to accept it.
But I remember how bemused I was when, in my early days of using a PC, the damn thing displayed things on the screen in a way that I knew it shouldn’t. I wondered what I was doing wrong, and it wasn’t until I read of other users with the same piece of software complaining of the same problem, that I realised that it wasn’t my fault after all. The manufacturers had simply released a product that was faulty. The fault wasn’t critical -
Of course, the faulty software should never have been sold in the first place. The programmers responsible for developing the product must have known that it wasn’t quite right, but my guess is that they were pressured by the company’s accountants into releasing it prematurely for the sake of the balance sheet. Eventually, after many complaints, the problem was fixed.
This way of working has become the norm in the software industry. After all, what better way is there of discovering the faults in your product than by getting your customers to do the product testing for you for free?
I’ll tell you a better way; it’s by getting your customers to do the product testing for you and charging them for the privilege. This is what the software industry does by selling flawed products and this is what, we the customers, have come to accept. Amazing, isn’t it?
There’s one rather large software company that seems more guilty of this than most. Almost as soon as it releases a new product, usually amidst lots of marketing hype, the bugs and security holes are discovered and exploited. In time, they’re fixed by the application of patches and service packs, which is fair enough, but wouldn’t it be nicer if the problems were resolved before the product was released in the first place? After all, we’re not usually aware that we need the product at all until we’re told we have to have it, so there’s really no rush.
I accept that this might be naive wish. With modern software being so frighteningly complex and the number of potential interactions with other manufacturers’ products being infinite, it can be argued that no company could possibly afford to employ enough people to test a product as thoroughly as millions of users worldwide would do by using it day-
Actually, I can think of one company that probably could afford it.
And it’s not General Motors.
© Philip Tattershall
April 2005
