Whether the software is a cool social app, an academic website or a real business, there is a common theme: the software is poorly designed and, even worse, it just breaks. As in falls flat on the floor, waves its arms in surrender, and just gives up. And not just once -- it keeps breaking! As I've said before, we really need a revolution in software quality.
Cool Social Apps
Hey, social is where it's at -- how can billions of Facebook users be wrong? Before long, there will be as many FB users as MacDonald's has sold hamburgers (billions and billions)!
Those guys must be great programmers, huh? I mean, just look at their office:
Here's one of them giving a talk at a conference:
See how cool he is? He's just wearing a t-shirt, not even "business casual."
The other social media are just as cool. Here's a "chill" Twitter office:
And Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO -- quite the opposite of a buttoned-down financial guy, huh?
It's perfectly obvious that these guys must write just the coolest, most awesome code ever. There's no way people this cool could make elementary programming mistakes, particularly when their application is so very dead-simple, and hardly ever changes -- they could spend practically all their time being cool and polish up some already-faultless code a couple times a day, and still be OK.
Except this little detail, which I scraped from my own screen, and which I personally have seen countless times:
Yes, the famous Twitter fail whale. I think Twitter got tired of all the publicity their "cute" failure message was getting them, so they reverted to something more discrete; here's an example:
FB is just as bad, of course, and they've always tried to minimize the message when they screw up:
Apparently, FB is incapable of keeping even the most recent day's worth of updates on-line -- you should try going back in history and seeing how far you get. Oh, you thought the stuff you wrote was your data, did you?
Naturally, it makes sense to consider that you get what you pay for; all these cool social apps are, after all, free. You can hardly complain when something you didn't pay for is flakey -- return it and demand a full refund!
So let's turn to a more promising field. Everybody's supposed to go to college and learn stuff, so...
Academia
Let's see if the universities do any better. I was just on a local college's website, and it was even worse than Twitter -- Twitter's code knew it was screwing up and put up the fail whale. In this case, any number of links I hit encountered badly broken code:
Oh, alright. The colleges are perpetually underfunded, and putting up a website that works isn't a high priority compared to ... all the other things they spend money on. I guess.
Probably a real business does it better, right?
Profit-making Big Company
Even more so, an essential public service, like the cable company! Those guys have the money, the funding, the experience and the mandate to do it right. Let's pick the case where their motivation is the highest: collecting money.
Oops.
Just a few days ago, I was on my local cable provider's site trying to access my account. Here's what I got:
Not just once, but repeatedly, for hours!
But maybe it's just TW that's got problems -- surely all the other big companies do things great, with their huge staffs and policies and procedures and all, right?
Sadly, no. Here's just one personal example from Verizon:
Summary
There's no getting around it. Software is just bad. Everywhere. We can speculate about why this is the case, but let's agree on the facts: it's bad, and not getting better.
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