“Successful” Software != “Good” Software, and Vice-Versa June 22
The other day a friend and I were discussing an article I had read entitled The Top 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time . The article proclaimed that the 90’s ISP giant AOL was (for lack of a better term) downright trash: the bubble-era behemoth took top honors as the worst-of-the-worst. My friend, being more business-minded than I, couldn’t fathom how a product boasting 34 million subscribers worldwide (at its peak) could possibly be considered “bad software”. I began to espouse ideals such as “robustness” and “reliability” and other buzz-word software qualities gleaned from my collegiate Software Engineering classes and explained how the bloated provider fell short of every one of these. He’d have none of it.
“Any product that can place a stranglehold on any market in the way that AOL did has to fall under the ‘good’ category otherwise it wouldn’t stick around,” he claimed. “No,” I retorted, “market share only equates to ‘successful’ and ‘successful’ is a completely different beast than ‘good’.”
Now, obviously there is no software metric quite as binary as “good v. bad” or “successful v. unsuccessful” and there is certainly a vast grey area between the bookends and any judgment made in these areas is just that, an opinion, but suppose for a moment we attempt to define the two qualities of “good” and “successful”.
If we define “successful” as my friend would have us, then this is a measure of profitability. It is a metric of the quality of the idea behind the product and how well that idea is marketed, not a metric of the product itself. If we define “good” as I (a software developer) would have it then this becomes a measure of technical achievement – a metric based on how accessible, intuitive, and overall bug-free the product is. Given these as a baseline it becomes self-evident that AOL may possibly be the most successful and least good product ever to reach market.
AOL is certainly not the only product to fall into this bewildering category wherein the success of a product far outweighs its quality. A majority of webizens would claim that Windows itself is the largest culprit of today’s bunch. You’d be hard pressed to find many outside Redmond who would concede that Windows over the years has ranked any higher than “acceptable” in their hearts, and sometimes far worse (ME anyone?).
So, what is it that makes these less-than-stellar products so lucrative? Its all about innovation and timing combined with the miracle of marketing. Gates saw an open landscape of computing at the consumer level and as such realized that mainframes just wouldn’t cut it. Operating systems of the future would need to be intuitive and user-friendly enough that anyone from eight to 80 would be able to use them without needing an engineering degree. So then why Windows and why not Mac? The Mac OS was just as intuitive (many would argue that today it has surpassed Windows in overall usability) and boasted higher levels of overall stability and security, so why did it not lead the PC revolution? The reasoning comes down to the core ideas behind both Mac and Windows OS.
Mac decided to specialize, where as Windows decided to try and make everyone happy. Mac OS developers didn’t have to guess at what the registry values on their chip were going to be, they simply had to walk two cubicles down and ask the designer. Mac did what they did well, but they only did it well on a very specific set of hardware, and as such the costs were high.
Windows went the opposite direction. Windows attempted to support every piece of hardware conceivable. In this way, no one company obtained a monopoly over hardware. Multiple companies had to compete to create better, faster, and cheaper electronics. Prices were kept down and Windows-based PCs became consumer-affordable. But, as they say, you can’t please all of the people all of the time. Such an ambitions undertaking is bound to have issues.
So, here we see how a downright fantastic idea on paper can fall short of being an overall “good” product. It’s a marvel of technical achievement that Windows has been able do so much for such a wide variety of hardware but achievement alone does not earn it the “good” merit badge. Installation issues, security issues and those pesky-yet-necessary updates to address the yo-yoing list of bugs cause the OS to flounder under critical scrutiny.
In much the same way, AOL was a good idea on paper which broke down in execution. By direct mailing millions of discs containing “free” access to this new magical “interwebs” people had only heard about on TV and from friends, AOL was able to shove their product down the throats of an unsuspecting populace who didn’t know better. Joe AnySurfer was unaware he could get the same service for cheaper with other providers and slowly became addicted to his buddy list. None of this however made the product any good. It didn’t need to be. People overlooked the busy access numbers, frequent drops, bloated and unnecessary UI, ads, and sub-par email simply because they didn’t know any better. As soon as broadband became widely acknowledged and consumer-priced, many jumped ship.
On the other side of the coin, we have “good” but “unsuccessful”. This is a much smaller category to the public eye but unfortunately a much larger category in reality. There are thousands of unsuccessful pieces of software out there. Every failed startup; every home-brew app that doesn’t make it out of someone’s mom’s basement; every website with counters reading in the tens of visitors; many of these are incredibly well executed but you’ve never heard of any of them. All the public hears about are successful products (or monumentally unsuccessful products that were no good to begin with). It’s hard to find an example from this category that everybody recognizes, but I submit that Mac OS X could fit this bill in the long run.
Mac has and will always manage just fine and aren’t in any danger of going under, however when one takes a closer look at the latest iteration of Mac operating systems and views it in context, it begins to look more and more like a waste of resources. OS X is a beautiful, simplistic, expensive operating system which only works on a fragment of the computers on the market. The machines which are required to run OS X have, themselves, induced a fair amount of sticker shock. Add to this the fact that all newly produced Macs use an Intel chipset - which allows Mac users to run Windows for the first time in history - and its plain to see why OS X is under-represented.
It’s an unfortunate truth that what’s a good idea today may not be a good idea in two years when all your hard work comes to fruition. All we (as developers) can do is challenge each other to write better code and to continue to push the limits of what’s possible. We work in a medium unlike any other where any idea is possible; it’s just a matter of finding a way to do it, and doing it right.