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Comment by retrogradeorbit | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem stems from the customer not caring about the quality of software. That combined with wanting it for nothing. They may say they care about it, but when you look at their behaviour, and not at what they say, they really don't care at all. It could literally delete all their files and most would shrug and go, oh well. What are you going to do?

When software users really start to care, and are willing to put their money where their mouth is, then you will see general software quality improve.

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Also, people who pay for the software are not the same ones who use it / care about the quality. This may mean different things too:

- when outlook sucks, you're likely not the one who bought it for the company and they in turn likely don't even have a choice - it's a requirement

- when your company accounting package sucks, again you're unlikely to be the one who decided to buy it - it's a company / budget / b2b sales decision

- when the printer driver is bloated and sucks for 10k reasons, you're not the one who paid for it - you bought the printer, the company producing the printer bought the driver (paid for creation to requirements) and you don't get a choice

- etc. etc.

For a single person it's hard to bargain using money. I won't pay for Windows. My laptop came with it anyway and part of the price went back to MS. Even if I cared about the quality of Windows, there's nothing I can do at this point to influence it.

The big software packages are just completely detached from their users at this point. As long as they match requirements and don't break on global scale, they're not going to change.

You could influence Windows by buying a Mac instead. And arguably that has happened. Before OS X started taking off, Windows Longhorn was about trying to do object oriented filesystems and other stuff. It ended up as Vista, with semi-transparent window borders.

Really interesting perspective. In this example, external competition created a worse product than if they were left as a stagnating monopoly?

Before OS X the Windows team were hardly focused on the UI at all. OO filesystems weren't going anywhere. At least Vista shipped and had some new features.

> OO filesystems weren't going anywhere.

Really? Have we forgotten Smalltalk machines so quickly?

Smalltalk machines?

The question is not did we forget, but who had anything to remember about them in the first place?

Time for a car comparison.

People frequently will pay extra for high quality (or at least the perception of it). The problem is that in the presence of network effects, they usually won't.

Cars are a great example here: they're expensive, they're complex, and there's a huge number of different models available. If you just want the cheapest thing available, you can go buy a Chevy Spark or whatever the current bargain-basement model is. But people don't, they'll spend more money on a Japanese car because they think (rightly so, IMO, and also based on reliability records) it's higher quality and more reliable than an American-brand car, even though it costs more to get one with similar features. Or they'll buy a German car for similar reasons.

But when you buy a Honda or BMW instead of a Chevy, this isn't going to hurt you in any way: you'll be able to drive on all the same streets, park in the same parking spaces, etc. You might have a more limited selection of mechanics.

Same goes for, say, clothing or shoes. You can buy some cheap crap from Walmart, or spend a lot more for something else. But you're not going to be prevented from walking into a certain restaurant because you bought a $100 pair of shoes instead of a crappy $15 pair of shoes.

This isn't the case with software. If you decide Windows is horrible junk (esp. with Windows 10 and its spyware) and decide not to use it, you're suddenly going to be prevented from using a lot of software.

I don't think people understand quality of software. They'd definitely care if it deleted their files - I have seen this happen - but there's really no way to assess this in advance, no recourse if it happens to you, and insufficient choice to enable you to refuse to use something ever again if it has failed you. If e.g. Adobe Creative Cloud is terrible (which it is), but required by the industry and your collaborators, what choice do you have?

We're back to Akerlof's Market for Lemons economics here.

This is what happens when markets are run as oligopolies.

Software is bad because software has been run as a cowboy business at all levels. Power in the market is so asymmetrical that only the justice system has any hope of bringing it back into balance.

A change in consumer law to put oligopolies on the hook for negligence and consequential damages would magically improve software quality in short order.

I think it's a bit more than that, but overall I agree with what you're saying. Package managers, config managers and popular distros have been getting to me more and more lately because of their lack of understanding of polish or acceptable standards. It just seems like software developers, free or not free, are trying to push out as much as possible without caring about their base users.

Examples:

aptitude has maybe 8 different binaries to do essentially the same thing. Hell, for whatever reason, doing a search with it and piping to grep throws a message to stderr saying that grep isn't fully supported yet. Wtf? It's 2016!

pacman has a separate binary for searching called pacsearch. My natural instinct is to do a "man pacsearch", but it doesn't exist. The only parameter that exists is -n for stripping color, because apparently this is an acceptable default when grepping: ESC[0mESC[1mESC[35mcore/ESC[0mESC[1mpacman ESC[32m5.0.1-2ESC[34m (base base-devel)ESC[36m [installed]ESC[0m

salt's man page has 134854 lines in it.

archlinux released a kernel compiled with a flag that completely breaks sound on one of arch's most commonly used laptops. That was 2 months ago and the community recommends recompiling the kernel. wtf. I only just noticed a couple days ago, since I wasn't able to do a full upgrade since pacman will fail if you install python packages with it - which get installed from pacman packages. Ugh..

gentoo's documentation is ancient and has typos, grammar issues and places where simple Y/N questions are difficult to figure out. I really wanted to give them a chance....

ubuntu is.... hahahahaha. hah.... hah.

systemd and anything associated with systemd is so embarrassingly difficult to use. Why does an error message that tells me to run journald commands have to be longer than the actual error?! What happened to just printing to stderr :(..

The flaky user experience of UNIX software is not a new observation:

https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Wow, cynical much?

I've been running linux professionally as a sysadmin for going on 10 years now and have had more consistent and mindfuckingly time wasting issues in the past year than I've had in the past five years.

"That wound is really starting to get bad, man. It's almost looking gangrenous" "WTF MAN THIS ISN'T A NEW OBSERVATION UGH"

If it was not so notoriously short on staff, and thus lagging the user space "state of the art", i would point you towards Gobolinux.

They care about the extrinsic quality of the software. A lot. Usually in a very narrow sense of "did it help me do what I wanted to do?"

Now, the intrinsic quality is an interesting beast that is much too subjective to be of any use debating. As soon as you find yourself debating the intrinsic quality, it is a good time to question if you are really trying to serve your customers.

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