News, Views and a Silicon Valley Diary

News and views, culled and edited from my online column, eJournal (www.siliconvalley.com/dangillmor):

Users United: An interesting online debate briefly flared last week about software and usability. Technology writer J.D. Lasica (jd.manilasites.com) thought Microsoft's new attention to security was useful but that it should put at least as much effort into making its products easy to use. Computers should be as easy to use as toasters, he said.

Dave Winter (www.scripting.com), a Silicon Valley software developer, rejected that notion. If you want them to be so simple, he said, computers won't be able to do much.

Software gives us abilities we didn't have before. We've accepted the flaws in return for those new tools, and the promise that developers will keep trying to make their products better.

But the vast majority of people are not, in the end, going to be satisfied with products that are both difficult to use and, in the worst case, downright risky. That seems, too often, to be the case today.

Yes, all software contains bugs. But the face to release — the "get it out there and let the users debug it" frame of mind — is too often an excuse for bugs that shouldn't be in a shipping product.

Sometimes I think the technology industry's attitude toward product quality goes roughly like this:

"If you knew how hard this is to do, you'd be thrilled that it ever works."