"Steve.T" wrote in message
ups.com...
I must politely disagree. And this is very much off topic to this N/G.

Since when has that stopped anyone?

So when software development is controlled and driven by the marketing
arm of a company, too often you get buggy code that has not been
correctly documented. [I've worked under those conditions too.]


Well, you'll sooner have cats and dogs living together than marketing and
engineering getting along. I've lived on both sides of the aisle and as a
now general manager I can say unequivocally that software development
*should* be driven by marketing. If they are doing their job right, they
understand what will sell and that is the point.

Looking at this from a product management standpoint, it is all about how
much priority you assign to building quality versus building other aspects
of the product. There is no free lunch: quality costs time. It may pay
itself back over the long run but companies often live and die financially
in the short one, so choices must be made. I have worked at two companies
that over-engineered their products and died as a result.

The real failure here is that consumers have no good way to get a handle on
the quality of products they're considering buying. This is especially acute
with typical business systems that are not mass-marketed. There is no JD
Power/Consumer Reports survey for software like there are for new cars. So
even if a customer says, "I'm willing to pay 10% more for a 5% improvement
in quality," there's no way for them to find out who is in fact better.
Vendors therefore have little incentive to do better than anyone else. New
features on the other hand will logically be prioritized over quality
improvements in many cases because while no customer will pay 10% more for a
quality improvement that can't be measured, they will pay 15% more for a
catchy feature that is quite obvious. We can argue the details but the
purpose of a business is in the end to make a product customers are willing
to pay for. Traditionally quality has not been rewarded by the market.

As an economist, I see this as a classic market failure known as the
"prisoner's dilemma." Because of the lack of information (difficulty of
measuring relative quality objectively), the market fails to provide
higher-quality options even though customers clearly want them. This
coincidentally is the branch of game theory that won John Nash (the subject
of "A Beautiful Mind") his Nobel some years back.

-cwk.