SusoSight SusoSight

Stability is hard, let's go shopping

Number:	10
Date created:	2001-08-06 06:05:06
Previous Thought:	Only in America...
Next Thought:	This old copyright law.
Voting results:	Yes: 20 No: 3

I think if you were to ask everyone in the world what their number one wish for their personal computer would be, most people would say that they want it to crash and break less. When I was a teenager I remember my mother telling me that they make things much more durable now than they did in the 40s, 50s and 60s. But she was not really refering to electronics.

So when is the computer industry going to go through this reforming era that will bring new computers to higher standards of quality. Most likely this will never happen. First of all, all industries are driven by money and corporations that are willing to kill to keep themselves in business. They don't care about quality, they just care about keeping themselves rich. If Seagate or Western Digital comes along and makes a super drive that is durable to all the elements and never has a head crash or loses data, how do you think that will make the companies that make backup solutions feel? What's sick is that companies in those types of situations feel that they have a right to exist. Their whole existance (backup companies and the like) has been based on solving a problem in another industry. Why can't they just realize when a problem has been solved, pack their bags and go home.

Software by far is not immune to these types of symptoms. Most of us have seen at least one example of a software problem being solved with another piece of software. I wonder how many of those "disk cleanup and recovery" software packages are sold each year.

Then there is open source software. It is basically like a fairy tale to most computer savvy people. Over the past few years analysts and critics have focused and reviewed the openness of the software. I think a lot of them have missed pointing out one major advantage of OSS. These pieces of software are developed with very little business-like influence on their development which means that the software developers have no reason why they can't make the software as good as possible the first time around. On the flip side, in the business world you have a sense of upgradability where corporations leave out features or don't fix bugs because they need to sell upgrades to keep them in business. Why don't they see that if they just made their software great the first time around that more people would buy it. Then they wouldn't have to worry about upgrade strategies. I'll just stick with open source. But I want that same secure feeling I get with open source software in my hardware as well. ;-)