by Charles Miller

When I looked online I was not able to immediately find proper attribution for this quote, but it was something like this: "The most beautiful thing about music is the silence between the notes, without which music would be nothing but an uninterrupted intolerable cacophony." There is a lot to be said about taking a rest, and a lot of people think the software industry could benefit from pausing to take a breath.

This is a subject that comes up frequently on the various tech-related podcasts to which I listen. Many in the Information Technology world have voiced their opinion how it could benefit everyone if software makers would just call a temporary pause on creating new features in their products and instead concentrate on fixing bugs in their existing products. Unfortunately for everyone, there is overwhelming pressure to push out new software features because those are sexy, and that is what sells. No marketing department would ever try to advertise "Same Old Software with Over 50 Major Bugs Fixed!" but noooo… marketing departments insist that only new features are what sells. Still, I like to hope there could be some kind of moratorium on any new features added to programs so long as there are known bugs that have yet to be corrected.

Leaked internal communications from software some makers reveal that in some cases the company policy is to ship a new version even with large numbers of known bugs in the product. Would it not be better to wait to start selling a new version when at least most or all of those bugs have been corrected? That is a judgment call because a bug can be a major problem or something so minor that it has minimal impact on the program's usefulness.

Something that befuddles users is genuinely needless changes for the sake of change. Free email providers including Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo are constantly making cosmetic changes to their user interface, and that unfailingly confuses many users. I recently received a phone call from someone using an email client (actually none of the above) and saying her program had updated itself so that now she was unable to check for new mails. When I looked I discovered the familiar [GetMail] button was gone. Then I realized the new-look user interface now had a new icon shaped like a little cloud, and clicking on that would check for new email. This was another in a long list of needless and worthless changes for the sake of change. The cloud icon was surrounded by more than enough white space to continue spelling out the eight letters in "GetMail" as on a button as in previous versions, even enough room to spell out "Erhalten Sie Nachrichten" in the German version, but noooo… some gaumless programmer trying to justify his/her job just had to make pointless changes and probably left thousands of users of the upgraded program not knowing how to check for new emails.

A common thread here is that the expert computer programmers who write software often do not relate to customers who use their products.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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