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So, your amazing feat of engineering car, with automatic transmission, ABS, a GPS, incredible fuel efficiency etc. stops in the middle of the highway sometimes.

So, your amazing feat of engineering car, with automatic transmission, ABS, a GPS, incredible fuel efficiency etc. stops in the middle of the highway sometimes. Your incredible display, which somehow manages to use liquid crystals to display beautiful 1080 HD video develops a jitter and bright line down the middle after a month. The machine gun which lets you launch tiny projectiles at speeds high enough to kill a person sometimes fires rounds without you pulling the trigger and causes a casualty. ... Yes, the technology is incredibly complex and represents a huge transformation in the way we do things, but a customer doesn't and shouldn't need to understand that, and certainly shouldn't be offered the complexity as an excuse for it not working correctly. Given the fact that most (all?) of the products mentioned in the post have some kind of price associated to using them, its not unreasonable to expect they work correctly. This is not to say that the people who made the tech are at fault per se, just that the customer is not at fault either for complaining when things dont work.

batista 14y ago
>Yes, the technology is incredibly complex and represents a huge transformation in the way we do things, but a customer doesn't and shouldn't need to understand that, and certainly shouldn't be offered the complexity as an excuse for it not working correctly. In some ideal world, where you can have things with MILLIONS of moving parts and TRILLIONS of states, designed by mere mortals and still have them be faultless, yes. In the real world, the customer will have to settle for things not being 100% perfect. He can now do things unheard of even in science fiction 20-30 years ago, and takes for granted things only appearing like 6 years ago (e.g YouTube). >Given the fact that most (all?) of the products mentioned in the post have some kind of price associated to using them, its not unreasonable to expect they work correctly. I think that, yes, it is unreasonable. That you pay for something doesn't mean anything related to it's error margin. You cannot demand the impossible just because you paid for something. It's like saying: "hey, I paid for this car, why does it is disfigured when it crashes and can kill me?". Consumer products (non digital) break all the time. You can even pay top dollar and yet have crap food served to you. And all those are far less complex than software.
- zaptheimpaler 14y ago
  My argument is not that consumer products should be perfect; it is that when consumers see deficiencies in them which could reasonably be fixed, they have every right to complain. In fact, they should complain because it will help make things better.
  - chris_mahan 14y ago
    What makes things better is that they buy a competing product.
prof_hobart 14y ago
Are they meant to be examples of complex tech that aren't allowed to fail and don't? Or examples of complex tech that does fail, but really shouldn't? >but a customer doesn't and shouldn't need to understand that, and certainly shouldn't be offered the complexity as an excuse for it not working correctly It's not an excuse - it's an explanation. These things are complex, and complex things sometimes fail. The average user can be forgiven for not really appreciating this, but lack of knowledge of the nature of complexity doesn't magically make it disappear. Of couse companies could take the NASA approach of spending huge amounts of time and money on formal requirements/analysis methods, building massively fault-tolerant solutions etc etc, but I doubt there's a vast amount of users out there willing to buy tech that's 5 years behind cutting edge, and costing many times more, simply because it (almost) never fails.
- zaptheimpaler 14y ago
  They are meant to be examples of failures which are extremely rare and would be unacceptable to consumers. Sorry, I realize they are quite unimaginative :P My response to your comment is the same as the previous one: >My argument is not that consumer products should be perfect; it is that when consumers see deficiencies in them which could reasonably be fixed, they have every right to complain. In fact, they should complain because it will help make things better.
  - prof_hobart 14y ago
    >They are meant to be examples of failures which are extremely rare and would be unacceptable to consumers. Sorry, I realize they are quite unimaginative :P Cars stop moving on a fairly regular basis, often as a result of the comparatively simple mechanical side of things. In the case of Toyota a couple of years ago, they didn't stop moving at all when the driver wanted them to. The other examples you gave have happened too - this despite the rather more critical nature of the machine gun issue and again its relative simplicity compared to, for example, a modern phone. I've got no problem with people calling out where they see problems, expecting someone to at least take their complaints seriously, and in a lot of cases expecting the company to do something about trying to resolve it. But that's not really the message I took from the article - the idea that that these problems are caused by lack of passion or quality on the part of the people making this stuff rather than being an almost inevitable result of the complex nature of these systems. TBH, I'm not even sure I buy that it's really that much of a problem. Almost everything isn't actually broken - the vast majority of our tech works remarkably well the vast majority of the time, and I prefer having tech that mostly works and is both available and affordable than having the same tech that will work perfectly when it's delivered in 5 years time at a vastly increased cost.

batista 14y ago

>Yes, the technology is incredibly complex and represents a huge transformation in the way we do things, but a customer doesn't and shouldn't need to understand that, and certainly shouldn't be offered the complexity as an excuse for it not working correctly. In some ideal world, where you can have things with MILLIONS of moving parts and TRILLIONS of states, designed by mere mortals and still have them be faultless, yes. In the real world, the customer will have to settle for things not being 100% perfect. He can now do things unheard of even in science fiction 20-30 years ago, and takes for granted things only appearing like 6 years ago (e.g YouTube). >Given the fact that most (all?) of the products mentioned in the post have some kind of price associated to using them, its not unreasonable to expect they work correctly. I think that, yes, it is unreasonable. That you pay for something doesn't mean anything related to it's error margin. You cannot demand the impossible just because you paid for something. It's like saying: "hey, I paid for this car, why does it is disfigured when it crashes and can kill me?". Consumer products (non digital) break all the time. You can even pay top dollar and yet have crap food served to you. And all those are far less complex than software.

zaptheimpaler 14y ago
My argument is not that consumer products should be perfect; it is that when consumers see deficiencies in them which could reasonably be fixed, they have every right to complain. In fact, they should complain because it will help make things better.
- chris_mahan 14y ago
  What makes things better is that they buy a competing product.

prof_hobart 14y ago

Are they meant to be examples of complex tech that aren't allowed to fail and don't? Or examples of complex tech that does fail, but really shouldn't? >but a customer doesn't and shouldn't need to understand that, and certainly shouldn't be offered the complexity as an excuse for it not working correctly It's not an excuse - it's an explanation. These things are complex, and complex things sometimes fail. The average user can be forgiven for not really appreciating this, but lack of knowledge of the nature of complexity doesn't magically make it disappear. Of couse companies could take the NASA approach of spending huge amounts of time and money on formal requirements/analysis methods, building massively fault-tolerant solutions etc etc, but I doubt there's a vast amount of users out there willing to buy tech that's 5 years behind cutting edge, and costing many times more, simply because it (almost) never fails.

zaptheimpaler 14y ago
They are meant to be examples of failures which are extremely rare and would be unacceptable to consumers. Sorry, I realize they are quite unimaginative :P My response to your comment is the same as the previous one: >My argument is not that consumer products should be perfect; it is that when consumers see deficiencies in them which could reasonably be fixed, they have every right to complain. In fact, they should complain because it will help make things better.
- prof_hobart 14y ago
  >They are meant to be examples of failures which are extremely rare and would be unacceptable to consumers. Sorry, I realize they are quite unimaginative :P Cars stop moving on a fairly regular basis, often as a result of the comparatively simple mechanical side of things. In the case of Toyota a couple of years ago, they didn't stop moving at all when the driver wanted them to. The other examples you gave have happened too - this despite the rather more critical nature of the machine gun issue and again its relative simplicity compared to, for example, a modern phone. I've got no problem with people calling out where they see problems, expecting someone to at least take their complaints seriously, and in a lot of cases expecting the company to do something about trying to resolve it. But that's not really the message I took from the article - the idea that that these problems are caused by lack of passion or quality on the part of the people making this stuff rather than being an almost inevitable result of the complex nature of these systems. TBH, I'm not even sure I buy that it's really that much of a problem. Almost everything isn't actually broken - the vast majority of our tech works remarkably well the vast majority of the time, and I prefer having tech that mostly works and is both available and affordable than having the same tech that will work perfectly when it's delivered in 5 years time at a vastly increased cost.