Internet's effect on Quality of software?
 

Just wandering if People here think that the fact that with Broadband becoming more popular and an ever increasing number of people having access to the internet whether its causing an overall decrease in the quality of (Mostly commercial) software?


It may be down to the increasing complexity of modern software but it seems to me that in the days when most people didn't have internet access that software seemed to be more reliable, probably because if it didn't work it wasn't all that easy to get a patch out to fix it.

Thesedays the Mentality seems to be release it now so we can start making money off it and then we'll fix it later. It's amazing that some software often needs huge patches (perticullarly games) within weeks of its release.

Surely if it had that many problems it wasn't ready to be let out of beta.

Re: Internet's effect on Quality of software?
 

It wasn't the Internet that popularised that approach. It was a certain Mr Bill Gates. ;)

Re: Internet's effect on Quality of software?
 

thats one way to look at it. The other is that you only know of the bugs because of the internet. Older software could just have as many bugs and you never see any of them because you didn't experience them yourself, now they're published on the net, people spread the news about them and you find out about them that way.

Also, software has become much bigger and more complex, things like multi-core CPUs add a whole new dimension to bugs being introduced, it's pretty hard to make something commerical and 100% bug free

Re: Internet's effect on Quality of software?
 

Well as it happens a simple Google of early MAc updates somes with some very interesting results. Macs First OS (I think) was simply called System 1 which had a little folder creation error which required the release of system 1.1 as early as 1984
There is quite a list of such patches under Mac

http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/os.html

Windows did not hit the market till 1985 ;) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows

guess its not just Bill Gates to blame after all ;)

Re: Internet's effect on Quality of software?
 

I don't expect 100% bug free, never going to happen but I do wander when shortly after release you get patches in the several Hundred MB - GB reigon

Re: Internet's effect on Quality of software?
 

Software is tested by for example 1000 beta testers whos set up finds so many problems that are fixed . Upon release the software then becomes available to hundreds of thousands of people with different set ups thus finding new enviroments to work in and thus finding new different problems.

Re: Internet's effect on Quality of software?
 

what about console games, where every system is identical pretty much :p:

Re: Internet's effect on Quality of software?
 

that's more down to patching technique, they have to be 99% sure that the patch will update *everything* that needs to be updated and not screw up other things

out of thousands of people there'll be a handful that will do something that the hundreds of beta testers didnt do and trigger a sequence of events that causes a problem

Re: Internet's effect on Quality of software?
 

So what are one's rights when it comes to software that should work on your system according to the specs given but doesn't?Can you demand your money back?

Re: Internet's effect on Quality of software?
 

You're comparing apples with oranges there. Windows 1.0 was not an operating system, it was an extension for MS-DOS, which was pretty flawed itself back in 1985. Meanwhile Mac OS 'System 1' was a full GUI-based operating system.

(Emphasis added by me).

Now, to the issue of whose fault it is for creating the culture of 'release first, bug-fix later'.

You don't prove that Apple created this issue simply by showing that they were better than Microsoft at creating a GUI-based OS and getting it to market years before MS did. You don't prove it by showing that System 1 had bugs in it either. The very word 'bug' is used because the concept dates back to the earliest computers, when real insects attracted to the hot components could cause short circuits, and therefore system crashes. Neither MS nor Apple created the concept of a bug.

But the OP wasn't asking who made the first bugs. He asked what was responsible for an apparent move from largely (though not exclusively) right-first-time software, to products where bugs and regular patches are apparently the accepted norm.

I would say Bill Gates and his crew bear a great degree of responsibility for this because of the ubiquity of Windows on modern PC desktops - if it were Apple that was constantly releasing famously buggy software, it would only ever be a footnote in the news because Apple computers, and therefore Apple's OS, are not nearly so widely used.

Last word to David Bradley of IBM: "I may have invented Control-Alt-Delete, but Bill Gates made it famous".

:D

---------- Post added at 16:32 ---------- Previous post was at 16:31 ----------

Yes. The Sale of Goods Act (as amended) applies to computer software as much as anything else. If it is not fit for its advertised purpose, you are entitled to a full refund - from the shop that sold you the software, incidentally, not the manufacturer.