“Quality is inversely proportional to complexity multiplied by time.”

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       C * t

As Complexity increases, Quality decreases.

As time moves forward quality still decreases even if complexity remains the same.

First postulated in 1997, I’m sad to say that nothing has changed.

For computers, year after year, the hardware and software gets more complex and this multiplication results in the abysmal, and rapidly declining, quality we’re experiencing in the computing industry.

Perhaps it’s due to the fast computers and lots of memory and disk space that breeds carelessness, but for whatever reason, the quality of some programs written by some of the world’s largest (not finest) companies is just awful. These same companies also charge for upgrades that contain more useless and buggy features. We upgrade on the hope that the old version’s bugs are fixed in the new version. They often aren’t, or they’re broken in different ways.

Of course, it’s not just large, monolithic corporations that tolerate lousy programming. It’s endemic in the industry. Too much pressure to ship, ship lots of features, and let the customers do your testing.

When you see great programs these days, you know that the programmers are truly superstars in their field because they’re so uncommon.

When I was programming, I took it as a personal failure if someone reported a bug in my code. Now, too many programmers just shrug their shoulders and give you the “whatever” look. Bugs are expected; what’s the big deal, right? Wrong. I don’t expect perfection, I expect ownership.

So how does this apply to Apple, you ask? How much time have you got?

Here are my observations after using Snow Leopard for a while:

Better: It does seem faster in areas such as networking. But that may be because I was having so much trouble with Leopard networking, that anything is better.

Bug: There’s a bug in Mail where Smart Mailboxes always sort by Subject. I can change it, but the next time I relaunch Mail, it’s back sorting by Subject again. Extremely annoying. [Update: With some judicious editing of a .plist file, I managed to make it so that it always sorts by date. Better, but needs to be fixed.]

Feature: I do like the new white text on black background menus in the dock. I shouldn’t though, because they’re different than the menu bar. I prefer consistency to cuteness, so maybe Apple should try this look in other menus.

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