Mini-rant: Bugs, Patches and Windows 7 release

As the Windows 7 official release date draws near and we muse on whether buggy software and vital post-release patching are here to stay…

The impending release of Microsoft’s new Windows 7 OS (October 22nd for anyone that missed it) has gotten us thinking about bugs nowadays and the ‘get it out and patch it later’ attitude that many developers hold towards software and product development.

Whether it’s a new game, mobile phone or even OS, there always seems to be plenty of dissatisfied customers complaining that “XYZ needs to be patched ASAP dude”. Or something like that.

But is this a fair approach from developers; to release a product and then expect customers to wait out a buggy launch period in the vain hope that a remedy will appear later down the line? After all, if you bought a TV and it refused to change channel on a Tuesday night, you’d probably expect a replacement.

Forgiving the slightly facetious example above; Is software any different to any other product in that consumers should be willing to accept that a brand new product won’t be (virtually) bug-free? In our opinion it’s a tough call.

Naturally we want our products to work, but in the developers defence we understand that foreseeing every bug in something like Windows 7 is a virtually impossible task – there’s probably not one person that knows all the function calls and routines in the many millions of lines of code that comprises 7; and debugging software is itself, not 100% accurate.

That’s not to say it would be impossible to create a bug-free 7, or any software, it’s just the resources required would make it a less commercially viable prosepct.

Ultimately consumers want new functionality, new interfaces and new features that they didn’t even know were possible, but the development of this often comes at the cost of reliability and interoperability within the old frameworks. And not only do we want all this, we want it now; with iterative updates to each product line in coming in ever-quicker succession.

In releasing Snow Leopard, Apple essentially went against this grain and released a [chargeable] stability update for its already excellent Leopard OS. Sure there’s a few new features tucked away, but the onus is clearly on making everything run smoothly, and paving the way for stable introduction of new features next time around.

Similarly, some malcontent Vista users regard 7 as the Vista ‘that should have been’, and with that mindset it’s easy to see why the disproportionately steep upgrade cost is a bone of contention for what they see as an essential stability update. As it happens, we’ve been using Windows 7 alongside our other machines for more than six months and think that the new version is worthy of upgrade, with plenty of features we’d miss if we had to downgrade back to Vista.

But would we want those features at the expense of the system being borderline unusable? Obviously not.

So the answer seems to be what we have today; mass distribution software being sold at competitive market rates, that is set for its purpose, but not without imperfections or foibles. The alternative is a much longer turn-around, with a much higher price-tag when they did eventually arrive.

But that’s just our 2 cents, let us know what you think in the box below.

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