I think the flaws have moved. I remember Mac OS 7-8-9 (”Classic”) fondly and the suite of software I regularly used there.
It crashed, and crashed hard, a few times per week. That never happens today, maybe at most once a month.
However, what has changed in terms of quality is that there are 1000% more smaller bugs. I never felt that small annoyances or problems were even noticeable or even existent back then. Every feature seemed to actually work. Yet just so far today I have encountered over a dozen small problems in my operating system and apps I use.
It’s exhausting in a different way. Two decades ago I felt ”safe” from problems by frequently saving my files. Today I dread having to navigate a UI that keeps giving me a thousand paper cuts of small bugs.
If our entire profession is unable to provide a better quality over the long term maybe it is time to take a long hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves ”wtf are we doing”? We are constantly churning out worse and worse products.
It makes a difference to my experience as an end user and that is what I am talking about.
I work in development and programming and with all the modern tools and testing frameworks and QA engineers and analytics and modern language we seem to only have achieved less crashes and more non-crashing bugs. It annoys me and I am a bit ashamed at my own profession.
I think the flaws have moved. I remember Mac OS 7-8-9 (”Classic”) fondly and the suite of software I regularly used there.
It crashed, and crashed hard, a few times per week. That never happens today, maybe at most once a month.
However, what has changed in terms of quality is that there are 1000% more smaller bugs. I never felt that small annoyances or problems were even noticeable or even existent back then. Every feature seemed to actually work. Yet just so far today I have encountered over a dozen small problems in my operating system and apps I use.
It’s exhausting in a different way. Two decades ago I felt ”safe” from problems by frequently saving my files. Today I dread having to navigate a UI that keeps giving me a thousand paper cuts of small bugs.
How many more features are we asking from our software today?
I think it's a two part issue.
If you build a software with the same features as a '96 piece of software I can imagine it would be exceptional fast and stable.
I also imagine that almost no one would use it as features are what bring in the users.
I didn’t ask for a single of these ”features” for example: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iphfed2c4091/io...
If our entire profession is unable to provide a better quality over the long term maybe it is time to take a long hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves ”wtf are we doing”? We are constantly churning out worse and worse products.
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I don't think it fair to compare cooperative multitasking OSs to OSs that requires virtual memory chips on a software quality basis.
It makes a difference to my experience as an end user and that is what I am talking about.
I work in development and programming and with all the modern tools and testing frameworks and QA engineers and analytics and modern language we seem to only have achieved less crashes and more non-crashing bugs. It annoys me and I am a bit ashamed at my own profession.