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Comment by wfjackson | Hacker News Reader

I am not surprised. I have, never once in my life, felt that a piece of software from a hardware OEM was well written. They tend to be universally highly buggy, heavily bloated, have highly confusing UI, prone to crashes and full of security holes. This includes software from Sony, Asus, HP, Samsung, RealTek, Nvidia, AMD, Logitech etc. I guess software development just not part of their culture and is an afterthought. The worst is that they bundle this software as a value add that the other OEMs don't have, thus wasting money on something that people almost never use instead of just discounting the price with that money.

My favorite UI gripe is having to get the idea to click on the folder icon on this screen to disable the front panel audio detection for a RealTek sound chip.

http://cdn.windows7themes.net/pics/enable_front_audio_jack_w...

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I used to work for a primarily-hardware company, writing software, and we suffered from much the same politics and software quality problems you describe. There are really two issues at play:

1) Hardware companies have to employ the waterfall model. Agile is not even a word in their vocabulary. This is because once a product is on the shelves or in the customers' hands, it is infinitely more expensive to recall and fix products. When all you have is the waterfall hammer, everything looks like a nail.

2) Culture plays a huge part. Senior management "knows best" despite your best efforts to convince them otherwise.

My boss once described it as "a huge ship that sails down the river. Once the ship is on its way, it is really hard to change direction or stop it".

This is why the Internet of Things terrifies me. You think these clowns wanna be responsible for promptly releasing security updates for the lifetime of every piece of hardware they've ever shipped?

In the end the clowns will only ship the hardware. That is Internet of Things IMHO will go through the same evolution as the PC industry.

More likely the mobile industry: no, you can't upgrade your ancient Android. You'll have to buy new IoT devices every year and throw the ones with security holes in the landfill.

Given the build date of the kernel on my phone and the publicly disclosed security bugs in the kernel fixed in later releases, I'd be amazed if any Android version (yes, including current ones!) is free of known security holes.

This is because, the guys calling the shots are still the old telecommunication OEMs.

Although telecommunications always had a very close relationship with the software industry, they see the customers in a different way.

Since the early days they would rather ship new phones than offer upgrades. Nokia was probably the only exception, in the models that weren't tainted with mobile operator firmware.

It only works for Apple, because they managed to get those guys out of the way. But they got their lesson and surely will not let others get away with it.

I've found one exception: the software on Panasonic Toughbooks was good when I used it. Well, it wasn't buggy, didn't seem bloated, didn't have a confusing UI, and didn't crash. It was not the greatest in UI design in every way (it was a bit clunky in a Win32 sense), but it was the first time I thought that the OEM software on a laptop was being friendly to me.

Does this include Apple?

No, but it tells you exactly why Apple can sell products at a premium.

It should definitely include iTunes for Windows.

It doesn't include Apple or Microsoft(which is a Surface OEM I guess).

or HTC.

Wait, I have a RTK audio chip. I've always been annoyed by the front-panel override with no option to disable it.

BRB, raging out

Are there any software companies making major consumer products like TVs yet?

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