Re:The State of the Art is Terrible
by jodrellblank on Tuesday October 04, 2011 @03:54PM
(#3072630)
> Quit expecting us to spend hours digging through arcane documentation, followed by further hours troubleshooting things that you left half-finished
I am amazed once again at some people's ability to take free stuff and complain that it isn't making them money fast enough.
That complaint applies equally to commercial software.
CEO arrives in a foreign airport, calls us up because his Blackberry now shows email headers instead of email, including email in his inbox which previously had all the content. The carrier tells me everything is setup fine for roaming and he needs to reset his Blackberry by taking the battery and SIM out, and then booting it with no SIM, then putting it back together properly. And if that doesn't work, he needs a new phone. And we couldn't talk him through it because that's his phone, and we couldn't email instructions, and anyway it was evening in an airport and he was in no mood for it.
This is a commercial device, praised for its business email handling, dealing with a well established, decades old protocol, from a large international carrier. Talk about a problem which just shouldn't happen, with a nonsensical solution.
And it's just one anecdotal example of every day workaround-finding. Wobbly software Jenga towers everywhere, and reboot-into-a-known-state is rule number 1.
I am amazed once again at some people's ability to take free stuff and complain that it isn't making them money fast enough.
That complaint applies equally to commercial software.
CEO arrives in a foreign airport, calls us up because his Blackberry now shows email headers instead of email, including email in his inbox which previously had all the content. The carrier tells me everything is setup fine for roaming and he needs to reset his Blackberry by taking the battery and SIM out, and then booting it with no SIM, then putting it back together properly. And if that doesn't work, he needs a new phone. And we couldn't talk him through it because that's his phone, and we couldn't email instructions, and anyway it was evening in an airport and he was in no mood for it.
This is a commercial device, praised for its business email handling, dealing with a well established, decades old protocol, from a large international carrier. Talk about a problem which just shouldn't happen, with a nonsensical solution.
And it's just one anecdotal example of every day workaround-finding. Wobbly software Jenga towers everywhere, and reboot-into-a-known-state is rule number 1.