Our industry has collectively taught average people over the last few decades that computers should be feared and are always a single misstep from breaking. We’ve trained them to expect the working state to be fragile and temporary, and experience from previous upgrades has convinced them that they shouldn’t mess with anything if it works. They’ve learned to ignore our pressures to always get the latest versions of everything because our upgrades frequently break their software and workflow. They expect unreliable functionality, shoddy software workmanship, unnecessary complexity, broken promises from software marketers, and degrading hostility from their office’s IT staff.I worked in the industry. This is exactly my complaint. I hated Microsoft because they were the worst of the worst. At least the company I worked for took pride of workmanship (despite pressures from management to cut corners and boost profitability). We built custom, then semi-custom large software applications but despite selling one or at most 20 our defect rate was easily 100 times lower than Microsoft's. We didn't have crashes with the need to reboot. It was nutty. Consumer software needs to be rock solid because you are building mostly for people who just want it to work reliably. But our stuff was way more reliable than the junk that Microsoft pushed out the door.
When we tell them that the new OS is faster and better, only to have the upgrade break a piece of software that we don’t care about but they really do, we burn our likelihood that they’ll ever willingly upgrade again. Every time we tell them that they can now easily edit video or make DVDs, only to have them abandon their first effort in frustration and never attempt it again because our software sucks, we drive them closer to indifference or resentment toward future technology.
Oh, and part of my career was researching software development methodologies and I always laughed myself silly at the Microsoft "system" for rapid application development. It was a joke. Completely ad hoc. It showed in their products.
2 comments:
I am not very computer literate as you know from past communications and I use Apple most of the time. What I do with this computer gives me very little trouble, but I have noticed some increases in problems with the Apple applications from stories that I have skimmed through. There seems at times to be rush jobs on some of their new stuff.
Thomas: You were smart to get an Apple computer. I've used them on some jobs and they really are much more "user friendly". Their interface is much simpler because Apple kept almost everything in house.
But Microsoft was more successful because it opened up its architecture to invite other to add applications. This made a Microsoft-based PC more useful, so it quickly outgrew Apple. But it also meant things were less "designed" and less "controlled". Plus, Bill Gates thought of himself as a software "genius" and he was really just a hacker, so his baby, the Microsoft operating systems, are weird jumbles of things.
Unless you have buddies who regale you with tales of Microsoft problems, you are probably naive in talking about "increases in problems with Apple applications". I haven't used an Apple machine in 15 years, but any deterioration in your experience is nothing compared to what Microsoft users have to put up with.
Economists continue to puzzle over how inferior goods can push clearly superior goods out of the market. The classic is the success of VHS tape players over Beta from Sony. But Microsoft vs Apple is another good example. The usual answer is that a tiny cost advantage or a simple feature that is better will drive the market toward one rather than another. And often this means the worse product ends up "owning" the marketplace. Bizarre but true.
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