A Software Design Manifesto (1990)

hci.stanford.edu

23 points·_pius··5 comments

The market is happy with marginal quality software, even if it's not good enough. (In some cases, marginal might be good enough, in others the externalities of marginal software aren't fully taken into account). Few people are going to pursue good software when it'll be trounced in the marketplace by marginal software. What's the solution to that?

I agree with this.

Peronsally, I try and keep my own well from being poisoned by using well-written OSS/Libre software. My entire working world is based on open source software. I use almost nothing that is not open source anymore. At work I will not buy or recommend anything to my boss that is not open source. This works great and I'm fortunate to work for a non-profit that gives me great latitude in this regard.

People needs to solve their problems today, and if a product with marginal quality (which is cheaper and faster to produce) can help them to get their job done, they'll adopt it.

The market won't wait until top-quality software is finished if they have alternatives they can use today.

Also, there is a paucity of information with which to draw conclusions as to the quality of software you are buying into (whether literally or figuratively) in order to make informed decisions, and there are rarely adequate resources assigned when making the decision to investigate potential problems (or the expertise to do so effectively). This is all confounded further by marketing departments putting out a lot of misleading information.

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