open this package and you're stuck with it

[Ronald Guilmette]

In article <1990Feb21.023933.16658 at siia.mv.com> drd at siia.mv.com (David Dick) writes:
>nelson_p at apollo.HP.COM (Peter Nelson) writes:
>
>
>>   Another larger question to ask is why this industry insists on
>>   shipping beta-quality products as finshed products.
>
>If software consumers and magazine reviewers weren't so
>all-fired impressed with long feature lists maybe developers
>could concentrate on quality not quantity.
>
>However, as it is, any developer who produces a product with
>a few well-thought-out and well-implemented features is guaranteed
>to lose against the product with a long feature list; the length
>of the bug list is irrelevant.

That is quite true in one respect.  Ask yourself "Irrelevant to whom?"

It appears to me that the problem cannot be blamed just on magazine
reviewers, but upon all the bloody *consumers*.

Every company that is producing either hardware or software products
has an internal (semi-secret) bug list.  Some of these companies will
actually give you their lists if you needle them enough before you
but their product.  Most however deny that such lists even exist!
Their tech-support people are trained to say "Bugs?  What bugs?"

The bad news is that most consumers of such products are too dumb
to insist on seeing these lists (or are too dumb to even ask for them
in the first place).  This longstanding tradition has given rise to
a situation in which the sellers have most of the leverage on this
issue.  Often you (as a consumer) are not in a position to insist
on being provided with a bug list for a given product, because the seller
knows that if you go to his competitors, they will not give you *their*
lists either.

The good news is that there are some encouraging counter-trends.  I think
that here in my home state of California, there is now a so-called
"lemmon law" that says that sellers of used-cars must provide the
consumer with a list of known major defects.  Back in the computer realm,
there is one publication (The Microprocessor Report) which is now arm-
twisting the major microprocessor vendors to make the bug lists for
their micro-processors public information (rather than trying to
play the old shell game of denying that any bugs exist).  As I understand
it, The Microprocessor Report has actually had several successes in
getting microprocessor vendors to pledge to make their bugs lists available
for publication.

So why doesn't this happen more often?  I guess it's because most people
who *buy* hardware and software get bleary-eyed looking at the features
and forget about the possibility that a sufficiently large qualtity of
bugs can make all of those features useless.

I for one will *never* buy another piece of hardware or software (with
my own money) until I get a bug list in advance.  Would anyone else care
to join this one man boycott of companies with "secret" bug lists?
Perhaps what we really need is a "lemmon law" for software. :-)


// Ron Guilmette (rfg at ics.uci.edu)
// C++ Entomologist
// Motto:  If it sticks, force it.  If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.