"Matt Barrow" wrote in message
...

"Colin W Kingsbury" wrote in message
ink.net...



And the long range costs of software done haphazzardly is...what?


Much cheaper products and faster evolution in terms of features. Perhaps the
most famed software development outfit in the business (in terms of quality)
is the Lockmar group that built and maintains the guidance control program
on the Space Shuttle. They know of a small number (5 IIRC) bugs that cannot
be fixed without causing worse problems elsewhere.

Among other things, the computer this program runs on has not changed much
in 20 years- it is basically comparable to an Apple II in terms of
processing power. Second, five or so years ago they did a little accounting
and figured that over the years, the system had cost about $35,000 per line
of code. Now, Windows XP is up into the tens of millions of code by itself,
and MS Office is perhaps twice again as large. Do the math and you see we're
talking numbers into the hundreds of billions. So perfection (or as close to
it as is possible) would cost something like the size of the budget deficit.

While individual users have very little power over a company like MSFT, they
do in fact listen to their big enterprise customers like say Bank of America
who buy licenses tens of thousands at a time. For years, quality was not an
issue because the cost of failures (system crashes) was relatively low. But
this is starting to change because of awareness about security issues, among
other things. A large number of the security flaws that exist in Windows are
symptomatic of slapdash engineering. A virus that takes ten thousand
desktops down costs the BofA probably millions of dollars. So now these CIOs
are telling MSFT that they need to get their act together.

-cwk.