quote:
Business + "alot of programmers" + idiot users = buggy software.
I think you're being just a bit hard on the end users here. There are lots of problems that commercial programmers run into: feature creep, clients who don't really know what they want and/or are constantly changing the specs for whatever software they want developed, too much influence from marketing. All these factors conspire to royally screw up many projects.
There is also one other factor: The A Number One purveyor of bloated and buggy software is Microsoft. Here is a company that has basically run out of ideas. The last good idea they had was Win 95. What to do when you've sold as many copies of Win 95 as you can? Here is a product that never breaks down, never wears out, and runs today just as good as it did when new. (With today's faster processors and more memory, it runs even better.) Close up shop and go home? Hardly! So they made some minor changes here and there, fired up the marketing team and pumped out all this hype to convince enough people that the next iteration was something grand and glorious. They fooled 'em with Win 98, Win98SE, Win ME, Win 2000, and now they're trying it with Win XP. However, it doesn't seem to be working anymore. They seem to have reached the limits on their ability to keep fooling people
As for Linux, I keep hearing this all the time: it's too hard, it's too "geeky", etc, & ad infinitum. It just ain't so. The KDE desktop is easier to use than
any version of Windoze, everything that the "average idiot user" could possibly want to do can be done from the desktop. You never have to look at a command line if you don't want to. If they can learn Winders, they can learn Mandrake. It ain't no harder, and with Mandrake's superior documentation, it's probably a good deal easier than Winders.
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[ April 06, 2002: Message edited by: jtpenrod ]
