Is it really all broken, or is just just broken in a different way?

18Sep/123

Is it really all broken, or is just just broken in a different way?

If things are this broken for people who live and breath all this stuff, imagine how broken it is for the average Joe who doesn't have the skill or confidence to understand why software sucks.

The average Joe/Jane doesn't run into this stuff because the average Joe/Jane doesn't have quite the volume of email that Scott does. Nor do they have the enormous social graph that Scott does.

I'm not going to whitewash his entire point by saying he's an edge case, because some of the problems he points out aren't a problem of scale. Some of them, like Chrome 19 and VS, I can't reproduce. Which means nothing and is the exact reason Google and Microsoft will give him for not fixing the problem.

The question for Scott and others is: Has software gotten WORSE? Or does software just suck in different ways?

Filed under: General Leave a comment

http://twitter.com/bkpearson bkpearson

Everything is broken. For example, Win8 bluetooth stack by default powers down devices that are in-use. To disable this, you have to dig into the device manager and uncheck the power-management checkbox. The normal average joe is not going to find this or know where to ask the question much less follow the 12 steps it takes to actually fix it. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/samsungpcgeneral/thread/5c2a89ab-051d-44f3-ab01-1628a60141ed
http://twitter.com/MotoWilliams Eric Williams

I think that since overall the state of the art hasn’t gotten better that it has indeed gotten worse. Things are supposed to get better not suck differently. All I can see is that my parents use of a computer from back in the dial-up days compared to today is that they just run into problems faster and more frequently. They tend to not give up as easily since the network speed isn’t the obvious bottleneck.
jarrettmeyer

Thank you for saying this. When I first read Scott’s post, I was also considering the use case. I’m also an edge case, but I run everything inside of VM’s. I “build” a dev machine with Windows XP .NET 2, VS 2008, and SQL 2005. I’ll “build” another at the other end of the spectrum with Windows 8, VS 2012, and SQL 2012. I’ll “build” a third with Oracle. I don’t put multiple databases, multiple versions of VS, etc. on the same machine. I run it all in VMWare. The host OS has VMWare, a bunch of video games, and iTunes. That’s it. Everything else is in the browser.

If your machine is trying to do it all, maybe there’s a reason it’s failing.
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