My dad complained to me about a problem he faced in his office PC. I tried to explain to my dad last week when he complained that pictures he pastes into documents appear on the monitor with lines through them. His video drivers were originals, and we know that darn near every PC shipped goes with buggy drivers. He was appalled that the computer industry ships flawed products and treat customers so shabbily. I've gotten used to these annoying upgrades and haven't thought about them in years. But he's right.
In the pre-flash days firmware was all but impossible to upgrade. Fewer products suffered from customer-discovered bugs. Did the horrific cost of a field upgrade make developers more careful in their tests? Are time-to-market pressures pushing products out the door before their time? Or is it possible that our products are so complex now, with so much code, that bugs are inevitable?
There's a parallel with the auto industry of the '70s. Then, Detroit expected dealers and customers to resolve long lists of problems. The Japanese came to America and showed the error of those ways and almost destroyed the domestic car industry. Today PC users -- and, it seems, more and more embedded systems consumers -- are also expected to work their way through punch-lists of defects.
In the '70s American automakers and consumers thought there was no practical solution to the problem of shoddy cars. Consumers were resigned to a series of dealer visits during the first few months of new ownership. If we assume today that big systems are inherently buggy, will some brilliant upstart prove us wrong? America is the world's largest exporter of software. Is that hegemony as tenuous as we found Detroit's to be?
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