I would love to avoid the issue of software quality -- but it keeps finding me and biting me, as I'm innocently going about my business. I guess you can understand that there are issues at a giant company whose main business is flying airplanes. It gets more annoying when the company says it makes computers. It's even worse when it's an incredibly well-regarded software company. Here are just a couple personal examples. They seem small. But they're indicative of a pattern in practice.
United Airlines
I fly on United airlines a fair amount. I needed information about one of their flights, and not even on a day when a computer systems failure brought everything there to a halt. Just a regular day after they released some new software, software that no customer was pounding their fist on a table demanding -- just regular old new software they felt compelled to release. Software that didn't work.
They point out that the new version isn't available -- but neglect to point out that the old isn't available either! Sad. Pathetic. They put the effort into assuring that their error message would include an attractive picture of one of their planes flying -- perhaps they could instead have put a bit more effort into keeping their software flying?
HP
This once-great company has been drifting for years. I'm amazed they still have as many customers as they do. Clearly some executive in some cushy suite is putting pressure on the marketing people to generate more leads. So I've been getting spam from HP like never before -- yes, HP is "spamming" me.
Word has clearly also come down to keep the pressure on those recalcitrant would-be customers like me. So, like a nice, obedient spam target, I click the opt-out button at the bottom of the e-mail.
I have great expectations, because, after all, "HP respects your privacy." I go to the relevant page,
So I go to the form, and make sure the "unsubscribe all" box is checked before clicking the button.
Then, I get a re-assuring page saying it's all set, no more spam.
Everything is OK then, right, because HP respects me and everything about me; they say so.
Except: I've gone through this exact process or one similar to it ten times in the last month, and nothing changes! HP apparently is eager for me to receive their information, and they respect me as much as ever. Their software is broken and no one cares. Is this huge? No, of course not. But it's the small things that tell you what's really going on.
For reasons that escape me, the general impression is that Google is great and everyone who works there is a genius. I get business plans telling me that everything is great with their software because they've hired a team from ... Google! Case closed!
Except it's not, from big things to small. Here's a small personal example. I went onto Google+ (one of the many projects/services that is rarely on the short list of great Google achievements) to get my posts. Here's what I got:
I tried and tried. No luck that day.
Can you imagine something being down for a day? The recent American Airlines system outage that I had the pleasure to personally experience while caught in a system-wide ground halt lasted a couple hours. In that context, it's a good thing that Google+ is nothing but a free service for helping people waste time.
Conclusion
Software quality is a huge, on-going, unsolved (at most organizations) problem. There are ways to solve it. The overwhelming majority of practicing professionals and computer science academics prefer to ignore it. Meanwhile, the rest of us get the message loud and clear: we don't matter to them, and words to the contrary are nothing but propaganda.
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