For some time now I have been ranting about quality of certain goods: be it software; hardware or everyday goods. Is it just me or are we accepting crap? By this it appears that many products are now released in Beta state – is this just an excuse for companies to release products that are sub-standard?
Of course this article mostly relates to software. It appears that companies are just shipping before the product is really ready. While this may be OK for the geeks amongst us, what about the normal Joe Public? How does he feel? How does he handle the buggy software? I understand why companies release early: it allows for bugs to be found for free reducing testing costs; popularity and usability can be gauged early in the product life-cycle.
However, the constant introduction of Beta goods makes it appear as if software never works properly out of the box. You need to wait for a couple of upgrade patches until the product works as expected. Why is this? Why should we accept goods that don’t work from the offset?
Even hardware is suffering, but this is more down to acceptance of shoddy goods. I used to think that everything I used to buy in Malaysia was cheap rubbish. You know, you buy a DVD player for 30 Euros – you would be lucky if it lasted a month. Get a player from a reputable brand for 5 times the amount and it will last for a few years. This is not the case – at least for me. My cheapo players have outlasted my supposed quality branded ones.
To this end, is it OK to spend 100+ Euros on something and expect it to last only 12 months? I don’t think so. I want quality products that work out of the box. No excuses.
Same goes for clothes and other soft goods. Why pay 5 times the price for things that will last the same amount of time. Quality of goods here is terrible. Probably manufactured in the same place as the cheap Malaysian goods too.
What do you think? Should we accept sub-standard as the norm?
I think it’s a shame people use the Beta label as an excuse to bugs, as it should really only be used for services the business model of which is under some sort of an evaluation, to indicate to the user: “things might change, we might shuffle bits and pieces around, or even close down unexpectedly if we so choose.”
As an enlightened developer I’m pretty sure you’ve read Alan Cooper’s masterpiece “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum”. After ten years of its publication, when I look around I’m afraid too few people on the planet have taken time to read it.
The user-facing features of every electronic device on the planet are increasingly defined by software, not hardware. This really worries me. Given the current (subjective) overall quality in any software production in this world, we will unfortunately need ctrl-alt-del our washing machines, cars, freezers, razors, and radios more and more in the near future.