Settling on Quality?

Oh my – another quality post. I’m afraid I’m starting a trend for myself, but I have a story to share.

As all gainfully employed workers in the tech field will tell you, we all have side jobs as tech support for all members of our immediate and extended families. This weekend, my mother-in-law opened a support ticket with me regarding her laptop – it was crashing randomly (that’s all the details you get when your m-i-l opens a support ticket).

So – I turned on her laptop, let it boot, then dealt with message after message from applications starting up and telling me stuff I didn’t care about. A backup program telling me that it needed a product key, an external hard drive utility telling me the drive wasn’t connected (duh), and an OEM replacement for windows wireless config launching to tell me I’m connected to a wireless network. The experience was annoying. But there’s a bigger problem. As I was looking at the 3 different web browsers installed and the few dozen or so other random programs and utilities installed, my first thought was “no wonder she’s having computer problems – she’s installed every app under the sun”. I always try to keep my main work machines somewhat “clean” – only installing applications I consider tried and true for worry that they’ll mess something up. Then I realized that’s wrong – I should be able to install whatever the hell I want without fear of losing overall quality (who knows – maybe I can and it’s all a mental problem on my end). The point is, that we (computer users) don’t seem to expect software to work. We’re not as surprised, alarmed, or pissed off as we should be when software doesn’t work correctly. Honestly – I’ve belittled people in the past for calling things bugs when they’re 99.99% user error, but I was wrong – user error or not, that .01% matters.

Ok, so software sucks. It really doesn’t matter – it’s still a profitable industry. That’s true, but I wonder how long it will be true. I wonder if something horrible (even worse than Windows ME** :}) has to happen before the world demands higher quality software. My hope is that we can start making better software long before something like that happens.

Oh – as far as my mother-in-laws computer goes, there was a crash dump on the machine. I attached a debugger and poked around a crash in the wireless driver. I put a later rev of the driver on the machine and so far, so good. I hope it stays that way…for at least a little while.