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Fred Langa is a senior consulting editor and columnist for Windows Magazine. Fred's free weekly newsletter is available via subscribe@langa.com. You can contact him at fred@langa.com or via his website at http://www.langa.com.

The Sorry State of Desktop Software

By Fred Langa

You see it in the technology news every day: Major software packages are routinely delayed and delayed again (Windows 2000 or Oracle8i, for example). And, despite the delays, the software ships with bugs.

That leads to a blizzard of patches, updates, and service packs, many of which are so complex that they introduce a new set of bugs and incompatibilities, requiring yet another patch or hot fix.

Is software quality really deteriorating?

Take Microsoft, for example--perhaps the highest-profile bugmaker of all. Microsoft has some enormously smart and talented people working for it, but in trying to create an operating system that runs on generic hardware and supports (in some cases) hardware and software standards dating more than 15 years, it has built a monster. It's amazing it works as well as it does, but maybe it's just trying to do too much. It's reached a point when just trying to keep up with all the patches, fixes, and updates emanating from Redmond is practically a part-time job in itself.

Microsoft isn't alone, of course. But everyone else's software is in much narrower distribution, so direct comparisons are too difficult. For example, Apple fans like to point to the Mac's relative stability--but Apple severely constrains the hardware its operating system can run on, which eliminates a host of variables from the mix. Plus, the Mac OS evolved very slowly during the Scully years at Apple: With few substantive changes in the operating system and a rigidly controlled hardware base, of course the software should be more stable than in the anything-goes world of Windows. But even so, all but the most rabid Mac fans will admit the Mac OS and Mac apps crash, too.

Similarly, Linux, BeOS, and the rest can also be more stable than Windows--but to some degree that's also because they do less. For instance, Universal Serial Bus ports have been common for about two years now, but Linux USB drivers are still very unfinished and rough-edged. And even with such missing functionality, Linux applications can and do still crash, too.

In all, the state of software quality surely does seem to have slipped, and I know I'm not the only one who feels so. This year, for example, the folks at BugNet (who track the bug-and-fix cycles of the major software vendors) couldn't find any company worthy of their annual award for Best Bug-Fix Performance.

What's your take? Is quality software a thing of the past? Has the complexity of today's hardware and software simply come to exceed what software developers can reliably support? If we want stability, must we trade off functionality? Who, if anyone, is making stable, bug-free software these days? Join in!

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