With all the recent news stories about zero-day bugs in IE and anti-virus updates that quarantine AOL or Excel, you might wonder whether the quality of software products is deteriorating. Judging from the everyday complaints the GripeLog hears about software that just doesn't work, I'd say you need wonder no longer. Software is indeed buggier than ever.
Software bugs have been with us ever since there's been software, and customers have certainly shown a willingness to tolerate glitches that would be unacceptable in other industries. But it's a little harder for customers to understand how today's software giants with their large quality control departments can so often prove unable to deal with bugs that can render their products unusable.
"I recently downloaded the Intellisync Handheld Edition Multilingual version," wrote one reader. "I had an earlier version of this program from Pumatech, but when our office upgraded to Groupwise 6.5, it would no longer work, even after downloading an upgrade that was supposed to do the trick. When I discovered they had a new version that supported Groupwise and the Smartphone 2003, I downloaded the entire program brand-new rather than going the upgrade route, jut to get a clean install free of any kind of legacy corruption. Surprisingly, it refused to recognize the activation code they provided and would not install. I went through a long process with their tech support trying to get it to work, and their response was basically that it was my problem and our IT should fix it. Our IT picked apart the problem to no avail, so basically I have this software I paid for that is useless and there is no known explanation for why the activation code would never work."
Fortunately for that reader, Intellisync did ultimately agree to refund his money. One company that's been much less willing to make any concessions to users over the very buggy recent releases (see Sage Has a Tough ACT to Follow) of its ACT contact management program is Sage Software. "Having been an ACT user since day one, I could hardly foresee the ungodly mess that was sold to us as ACT 2005," one reader wrote. "Obtaining assistance from customer (no) service during the warranty period was bad enough, but to be forced to ante up for additional service to seek help to work around problems created by the software is insufferable! This whole gig seems to be nothing more than a ploy to line their pockets by creating booby traps within the program. Now they expect us to buy ACT 2006. If I go back to my boss and hit him up for hundreds of dollars in tech support and a new upgrade, I might as well get my resume ready."
Why don't customers simply force software companies to take responsibility for their bugs by going to the competition? Well, there's no guarantee the competition doesn't have even worse quality control problems, as shown by the example of a reader who just wrote me about a bug with TurboTax deductible calculations. "I call Intuit about this -- they say I must pay for them to help," the reader wrote. "Then I see this article describing the same problem. But (because the article writer is reviewing TurboTax), Intuit does not make the author pay. Why must I?"
Had that reader instead tried H&R Block's TaxCut, however, he might very well have run into an even worse deduction-related bug reported by a different reader. "I purchased H&R Block TaxCut's Premium+State package, and the CD with TaxCut is fine," the H&R Block customer wrote. "But the second CD, which is supposed to contain the DeductionPro utility and which is labeled as such, actually contains a program called 'NTI Backup NOW 4.' I talked CompUSA into opening another package and swapping its DeductionPro CD, and the replacement is also really a copy of NTI Backup. So it appears to be a manufacturing defect somewhere. I wrote H&R Block about it, and all I got back was some gibberish from an appeasement clerk whose job is to answer without telling me anything. Just to add spice to the experience, the version of NTI Backup appears not to work either -- I tried to back up a couple of gigs of hard drive material, and all I got was seven CDs marked as full without there being any readable data. Life is fun, isn't it?"
Sure, software bugs have been with us a long time, and now it's doubtful we'll ever see the back of them. But when even big software companies like these can't overcome dead-in-the-water software quality issues for their customers, you have to wonder. So what do you think -- is software quality deteriorating? Post your answer on my website, or write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com.
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