>The average peice of consumer software would then cost $12,000 and require the user to pass a test and pay for insurance just to use.

Hi Mike,

Perhaps you're right about the price of software. I remember when sowftware used to be far more expensive than it is now, but it came with better tech support than nowadays and a printed manual that was actually helpfull.

Regarding the insurance and license, a car works fine regardless of whether the driver has or not insurance and a license to drive.

Generally speaking, as products, software's quality in general is probably the lowest you can find in anything you'll ever have to pay for.

The car analogy is often mentioned when discussing this topic, but it's really not a good one. Software, unlike cars, does not degrade with time (or at least it shouldn't), so there's no reason why a word processor developed 20 years ago shouldn't work as it did when taken out of the box and no reason for anyone in their right minds to buy a new package every 5 years. For this reason, sw developers have to rely on new features in order to keep selling new products and stay afloat. This results in a plethora of unnecessary features being shoved down users' throats, which in turn results in more complex products, which in turn results in more bugs. And going back to the "staying afloat" issue, at some point developers end up converting a service-pack into a new (profitable) release of the product, starting the cycle all over again.

MS Word is a good example of this. From an average user's perspective, Word 95 had everything most people would need and use. After that, most of the added features were just fluff for what they're worth. Word 97 added OLE automation, but from a user's perspective that was meaningless to 99% of the population.

>And I'm no mechanic, so I hope I don't downplay the complexity of a motor vehicle, but its taken almost a hundred years for Ford Motor Company to create a machine that can move and they're still being recalled like mad because theres something wrong with them. Meanwhile, Windows has evolved in 10 years to millions and millions of lines of code to do more sophisticated things, IMO, than move a passenger.

And I don't mean to downplay the complexity of millions of lines of code, but tell me, do you think that WinXP does thousands of times more sophisticated things than Win 3.0, which also let you run programs on your computer? I don't think so. Those millions and millions of lines of code are not devoted to better quality (to quote Van Der Rohe, "less is more"), but to nifty (and often unnecessary) user interface features. Actually, nowadays, they're devoting millions of lines of code to implement the "brand new" FLAT interface, which was already part of older operating systems. Perhaps they should instead remove the dust from their Win3 source files, where these "features" were implemented with millions and millions LESS lines of code.

Software is to hardware like entropy is to space... it will grow to take up all available resources, thus allowing us now to use a computer that could take a man to jupiter as we used an XT with DOS and wordperfect two decades ago (but with a nicer interface).

Software would probably be recalled as well if developers were forced to be liable for more than the media their product is shipped on (just like car makers are). I can see the day come when life-sustaining machines run on a windows platform and the family of a patient literally killed by a bug won't have any recourse because the license agreement states that the software is to be used as is and the developer is not responsible for any consequential damages to data or life.

Alex