OT: software too bloated and buggy?

It's a matter of cost. See

rocket-proof CAD would cost 100 times more to develop. Only a few % of the customers would pay the price, so a single license would be around $10M... In other words, you can afford it because it is buggy. (My SW add-ins are $199 only! ;-)

Philippe Guglielmetti -

It'd be more expensive, but I call bullshit on the idea that better software would be anywhere close to 100 times as expensive. I might, at a stretch, be willing to give you a factor of 2 for increased development costs. In fact, if one took the trouble to account for the external costs (I figure I've got ~4hours this week into dealing with SW bugs), I expect it'd probably cost less.

There's some precedent in the manufacturing arena that properly instituted quality programs can actually contribute to the bottom line--back in the

80's before Detroit got religion, they used to argue that building crap was essential to making money. But, after the Japanese essentially forced them to improve quality, they found that it actually improved their profitability--scrap and rework are EXPENSIVE.

It's not the fault of any particular software company, but it'll be a better world when software writing grows up and becomes an actual engineering discipline.

the

Companies like Blizzard (i.e., Diablo 2) put out extremely high quality software for 2 orders of magnitude less than SW. The games industry has a lot of competition; if your software is buggy, people are going to buy the next guy's software. In the CAD market, with so few companies producing software, each with their own special interface that people grow attached to, this doesn't happen (otherwise disgruntled SW2003 users wouldn't be complaining, they'd be using Pro/E or AutoCAD). As more competitors jump into the market, things will improve. I just got a free CD in Mech E magazine for AlibreCAD, a new SW competitor... (Anyone have any experience with it yet?)

Michael

Philippe Guglielmetti wrote:

OK...

lets say solidworks WAS twice as much. Do you really think that your company would have went with it? I highly doubt it. As a matter of fact, if it had all of the same features as a competitor or maybe a little more, there is NO WAY you would have bought it. They could have said "yeah, but it is stable stable stable" and I still know there is no chance your company would have bought it. They would have went with the cheaper competitor. I was close enough with the sales of this software to know how cheap companies are....

TT

"Michael" wrote

I said "A ROCKET-PROOF cad would cost 100 times more to develop" because the article I mentioned

Space Shuttle software development and reliability. And I read somewhere (shame I don't find it again) that a single line of NASA-certified line of code actually costs 100 times more than a line of code in a Microsoft product.

Sure. I'd say it is an engineereing discipline, but the complexity of projects grows very fast. Moore's law states that computer power doubles every 18 months, so you can double your software performance at the same rate... So you feel a software is unreliable because it crashes once a day, but you run 10 times more line of codes on a machine 10 times faster than 5 years ago. I wish car industry was improving reliability as fast as software industry does...

From a software eng> So....... Since your stuff is so "reasonably priced", we can also count on

Thank you for your feedback. It has been assigned #234567... I'm just an honest engineer you know, I don't "sell" products, I build them... There was a smiley somewhere... Oh, here it is ;-p

Philippe Guglielmetti -

TT--

twice the development expense does not correlate with twice the price for the finished software.

SW development engineers are a relatively small percentage of the corporate spending. Assuming you doubled the development expense, support would go down, and sales+marketing would presumably remain essentially constant, as would executive salaries. To maintain constant profitability, the price increase would be MUCH less than double.

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