Re: Long names are doom ?

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

That seems to be a misunderstanding of markets. Seems a few years ago, GM,
Ford & Chrysler were having all sorts of hardships over "Quality" because
apparently, once "Quality" was available from another source, people were
staying away from American automakers in droves.

"Quality" means different things to different people at different times.
Sometimes "Quality" is a nice crystal Stubenware wineglass. Sometimes
"Quality" is an inexpensive Dixie cup that will hold water for a brief time
before failing. "Quality" is not synonymous with "never breaks". A
quick-and-dirty program that patches some disk problem for me at zero cost
can "break" in unusual conditions that I never produce & still be "Quality"

If market forces won't favor reliable software, I submit that this needs to
be demonstrated. Find an unreliable product with no competing reliable
product available. Produce a reliable product at a similar price and with
similar features and with a similar marketing budget. (IOW, all other
parameters held constant) Will the public purchase the Reliable product or
the P.O.S.?

I think if we duplicated the functionality of - say - Netscape, only wrote
it in Ada so that it didn't periodically lock up, core dump, etc., & made it
available under similar terms, it would probably become the browser of
choice. (Of course, my current copy of Explorer seems to be working with
more reliability than the version of Netscape I have, so there *is* a better
quality product in the market. Hard to test the theory unless AdaBrowser
(tm) is more reliable than that.)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:kbLV6.6795$pb1.259296@www.newsranger.com...
> In article <9g7r02$mni$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, Marin David Condic says...
>
> Its a fallacy that the market cares about quality. Sure users whine about
lack
> of it, once they get the product. But before that point, they just want
the damn
> product yesterday (and as cheap as possible), no matter how badly it
works.
> Mostly its us *developers* who care about quality. After all, who wants to
spend
> their life whole building shoddy crap? (Its rhetorical; please, don't
answer.
> :-) )
>
> For a good reference on this subject read "Worse is Better" (
> http://www.ai.mit.edu/docs/articles/good-news/subsection3.2.1.html )
>
> It also provides a pretty good explanation of why C is more widely used
than
> pretty much every language whose group this thread is crossposted to.
>
> ---
> T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
>           home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com