Ah, we'll just issue a firmware update later if there's a problem.
Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo presents a scathing, enlightened look at our present-day beta culture, as he calls it.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Beta Culture
Do you get the feeling like companies don't care as much as they used to about quality, about getting a product tested and 100% perfect, before getting it out the door?
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2 comments:
Andi,
if i recall correctly, you're a security guy, so you know that you can only detect presence of bugs, not their absence. You can try to pre-plan, bake-security-in-design, exhaustively test it, fuzz it, have models for everything... but in the end you're still just covering small pieces of much larger ground. This is a fantastic piece of writing on this topic:
http://faculty.nps.edu/dedennin/publications/National%20Computer%20Systems%20Security%20Award%20Speech.htm
I do agree however, what the regular commercial companies do with products these days is ridiculous, they release beta-quality products and then let people deal with the bugs, only sometimes offering updates. Cars used to be fairly resistant to it, but these days you still need updates to calibration, and TSB's for all kinds of hardware are more and more frequent.
So where does it fall apart? Is there no money in providing a superior product? Are the problems minor enough that the customers just don't care?
The main idea behind competitiveness in capitalism that the people will naturally gravitate toward superior products. That's apparently not true, as people buy crap and just deal with the problems as they appear. Such approach, while acceptable for IPod's and video games, falls apart once you hit issues like aeronautics or SCADA. We cannot stop Walmart to push cheap gizmos and convince people that two cheap toys are better than one solid one. We need to remember however that there are plenty of applications where that is simply not true and proper, solid, surprise-free operation will not come cheap.
Excellent points.
I think a capitalist system like ours (at least for the time being), especially with the information flow we have today, will self-regulate.. It's a slow cycle, but Jesus Diaz' post, and your post and mine and other pepole's general revolt against the beta culture will mean we will seek out less beta products and more 1.0 products. And companies tend to at least try to build what we want to buy.
Or at least I can hope.....
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