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Thread: Business software quality. How has it got so poor?

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    Business software quality. How has it got so poor?

    As the title of the thread really.
    It is getting increasingly common to install business related software and find there are major, incredibly obvious bugs.
    One example is that even the current version of Exchange 2007 (sp3) or any earlier version simply does not work with Windows server 2008 or R2.
    The pre requisites are IIRC: SP1 on server 2008 64 bit and at least Exchange server 2007 SP1.
    There is a bug where one of the services is not listening on ip6 and you have to add an entry to the hosts file to get it working.
    This bug was identified during the Exchange 2007 SP1 beta, yet has still not been squished.
    I have just installed the Vmware vcli on a Windows server 2008 R2 machine and the installer simply doesn't update the path environment variable meaning any attempts to use any of the commands fails. i.e. without a bit of manually doing what the installer missed, the softwqare cannot work at all.
    Vmware have actually had even more of a mess up with an old update. I believe after applying it, no VM's could power on with it complaining about a licensing violation. I believe this happened on all installations as well.

    One must ask how poor the testing must be to miss these glaring bugs in the first place, let alone the lack of effort to fix them.

    Hardware isn't much better. Anyone that has had more than a handful of HP DL380 G5 servers will more than likely had their power supplies go pop. I believe the eventual failure rate was around 75% or higher.

    I think things were allowed to get this bad simply because only businesses are involved. It is not in the interests of a business to begin a costly and time consuming legal process against their suppliers or the company that wrote the software. It is cheaper to just implement the workaround.
    I think a fair analogy would be that a car company makes a new car where yuo cannot get in the drivers door if the outside temperature is over 22 degrees celsius.

    Is this perfectly reasonable of these companies or not?
    "In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship."

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    Re: Business software quality. How has it got so poor?

    These kinds of flaws really shouldn't be present in any kind of product or service. The problem is society has become too accepting of substandard workmanship. It's even rewarded since people will buy regardless simply because it's much cheaper than it's better designed and more robust competitor (if one exists).

    So basically, I blame IT managers/consumers.
    Quote Originally Posted by Agent View Post
    ...every time Creative bring out a new card range their advertising makes it sound like they have discovered a way to insert a thousand Chuck Norris super dwarfs in your ears...

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    Re: Business software quality. How has it got so poor?

    I find that Microsoft seem to take an age to fix none security bugs

    DSADD has had a command breaking bug since 2003!

    You try and add a profile path with DSADD and you will find that it will not work

    the command is $username$ and it adds $username$ to the path! add %username% and it just adds the account name that is creating the account!

    Worst mistake ever was Sonicwall and its licensing. If it found that you were out of your license period it would shut down the firewall features, sonicwall has a license server "in the cloud" that end users have no access to. The firewall just keeps checking the license status against the online license server. They had an outage and had programed in that if the firewall can't contact the license server, shut down all features.... disaster.

    I think it mainly hit the TZ180 and we only had one customer using one.
    Last edited by Jay; 18-07-2011 at 12:01 AM.
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    Re: Business software quality. How has it got so poor?

    Quote Originally Posted by aidanjt View Post
    So basically, I blame IT managers/consumers.
    Actually, you should blame share holders.

    Share holders want share price increases and dividends, fixing security problems, adding new features and releasing new products will do this far more than fixing trivial problems that can be manually worked around.

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    Re: Business software quality. How has it got so poor?

    Quote Originally Posted by BobF64 View Post
    Actually, you should blame share holders.

    Share holders want share price increases and dividends, fixing security problems, adding new features and releasing new products will do this far more than fixing trivial problems that can be manually worked around.
    Yes, the software industry's usual capitalism dynamics has also exerted pressure in this race to the bottom, as well as perpetual 'upgrading'. But ultimately, their customers haven't said 'screw that, and screw you', so they keep doing it. Do you think shareholders would be getting more share valuation and dividends if they had reduced revenue?

    Entire business sectors have been built around these defective systems and the obscurity of their faults. So it's not exactly cheaper for customers in the long run, either.

    Basically, people are stupid.
    Quote Originally Posted by Agent View Post
    ...every time Creative bring out a new card range their advertising makes it sound like they have discovered a way to insert a thousand Chuck Norris super dwarfs in your ears...

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    Re: Business software quality. How has it got so poor?

    Vmware have actually had even more of a mess up with an old update. I believe after applying it, no VM's could power on with it complaining about a licensing violation. I believe this happened on all installations as well.
    My Mrs brings up things that happened 3 years ago in arguments as well
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    Re: Business software quality. How has it got so poor?

    Quote Originally Posted by Moby-Dick View Post
    My Mrs brings up things that happened 3 years ago in arguments as well
    I think the fact that the vCLI doesn't work properly shows that they didn't learn from the lessons there.
    I'm not just singling out VMware for this. Everybody is as bad as each other these days. It used to mainly be Microsoft that released really shoddy first versions of software. Now it seems like it's a race to the bottom.
    To be fair on MS I would say their installers have improved hugely in the past 15 years. Provided you are only using the version of Windows just prior to their server software. I like the pre requisites checks for installing etc.
    "In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship."

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    Re: Business software quality. How has it got so poor?

    Agreed - though I'm sure they would rather you used VMA or PowerCLI these days anyhow
    version 5 of ESX has come up with anything nasty so far
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    Re: Business software quality. How has it got so poor?

    Quote Originally Posted by Moby-Dick View Post
    Agreed - though I'm sure they would rather you used VMA or PowerCLI these days anyhow
    version 5 of ESX has come up with anything nasty so far
    /me goes off to see the powercli commands to configure, enable and test SNMP on individual ESXI hosts.
    The VMA seems fine but it has a bit of a learning curve if you don't use linux much.
    i have to admit that i'm really, really looking forward to Vsphere 5.0 being in my production environment.
    "In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship."

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    Re: Business software quality. How has it got so poor?

    SNMP ? interesting choice for management - are you not using vcenter or just a home grown EMS ? once you have VMA configured , the command syntax is the same as rCLI ( if I remember correctly )
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    Re: Business software quality. How has it got so poor?

    Quote Originally Posted by Moby-Dick View Post
    SNMP ? interesting choice for management - are you not using vcenter or just a home grown EMS ? once you have VMA configured , the command syntax is the same as rCLI ( if I remember correctly )
    Not so much management as monitoring. We use Whatsupgold for monitoring, data collection etc.
    "In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship."

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    Re: Business software quality. How has it got so poor?

    Ah - never been tempted to look at something like SCOM ?
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    Re: Business software quality. How has it got so poor?

    It's the same with software and hardware. Products are released as soon as possible, followed by patches, with luck. We've become accepting of this behaviour. Since there's not much that buyers can do about it, the race to the bottom is on. Perhaps a discount for beta testing is in order.
    ... I use now a big vent for the whole machine now, but I cant use it forever, it is my grandma's ventilator...

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    Re: Business software quality. How has it got so poor?

    Quote Originally Posted by Moby-Dick View Post
    Ah - never been tempted to look at something like SCOM ?
    I would love to use SCOM for the monitoring and SCCM for management. The problem is justifying the cost. I can't se us using SCOM in the near future, however I'll be seriously looking into SCCM to see if it's justifiable.
    "In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship."

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    Re: Business software quality. How has it got so poor?

    SCOM itself isn't all that much
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    Re: Business software quality. How has it got so poor?

    I once worked in a development testing place and the biggest problem was trying to replicate the hundreds of thousands of variables. Also, it is well nigh impossible to be everything to everyone and some simple fixes could/do have major implications. Finally, as stated, budget constraints exist everywhere.

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