planetmullins feature article by rob mullins

WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER UPGRADE SOFTWARE WHEN NEW PRODUCTS COME OUT.

by rob mullins

so you've got a chance to jump on that new operating system, photoshop upgrade, new datebook calendar program,
or new whatever that is supposed to make your life or computer work better faster and harder for you. why shouldn't you
do it right away?

this is a timely article for any of you that jumped into the elite category of microsoft OS upgrades, specifically WINDOWS XP
which recently came out.
it was announced on the news today that there are major security holes in that OS that allow any hacker or person with a fair
amount of computer knowledge to get all your data from your computer without you knowing it....all you have to do is connect
that new better faster smarter computer to the internet, and voila......all of your info is theirs.
so after years in development, how could a big company like microsoft make such a huge mistake?
its easy.
the software was probably not even done, tested or ready to go when it was made available to you for sale.
what's worse, almost nothing that computer companies make available to you is ready for you to buy when you buy it.

now, the above assertion may infuriate you. it infuriated me when i first learned how the companies work. i just couldn't believe it.
in fact, if i hadn't been working for a major software company at the time, i probably still wouldn't believe it.
yet year after year, day after day, they keep on proving me right. time after time. here's how it works:

advertising and marketing campaigns are designed to sell products. advertising and marketing campaigns are designed to recoup
the costs of r&d on products. that's business. its a rare thing for a software company to have a product really ready to go at the time that
the advertising and marketing department deadlines are going to print. i'm sure what we all like to think, and that they like us to think, that
the products are tested, reliable, bulletproof, and strong when we buy them. nothing is further from the truth. it is a common practice for companies
to release products long before they are ready so that they can start recouping costs right away. they put the products out, take our hard earned money,
and set up a helpline and a webpage, and wait for us to find all the problems in their products. most of the time, they charge us money to call and tell
them what doesn't work about their product. then they take notes, and pass that information along to the developers over time, and gradually come up with
fixes to the bugs in the product. does this piss you off? it made me mad as hell when i used to try and keep current with all the new software.

i was working for a company helping them with a demo for a product when i found this out. i had about a week to create the demo for the company.
the product kept on crashing on me while i was trying to create the demo. i kept writing down what was wrong with the product and calling the company
on the phone to tell them what was going on. they kept telling me to work around the problems. i kept asking them to fix the problems. they kept on
working on it. in the meantime, at the end of my week working on that product, people started buying it and the demo i had created. the product kind of worked, but
it didn't really do about 40 per cent of what the advertising said. i was mad. they were calm. i was glad i wasn't the guy on the other end of the phone when people were
calling in fuming about how their new product didn't work.

over the course of the next six months, the company fixed about 90 per cent of the 40 per cent of the things that were wrong with the product.
the customers kept calling them and telling them about new problems. they kept taking people's money. i quit working for them. it sucked.

since that happened to me, i never buy anything when it first comes out, no matter how good it looks. i wait about six months, watch all the panic reports
in the news about how the product doesn't work and put people's information or lives at risk. then if it looks like it is something worth getting down the road, i buy it.
i'm tired of paying companies my money to be their beta tester.