Recently I was speaking with the VP of Engineering of a software company in Denver, CO. Since his company deals with many cellular phone companies, I asked him his thoughts on the recent report that listed cell phone companies near the bottom of most customer satisfaction surveys. He said he wasn’t shocked. I asked if that would ever change. He said he didn’t think it would. He said it would not change as long as customers tolerated poor cell service and dropped calls. But don’t all cell phone companies drop calls and have poor cell service? In the opinion of most the answer is yes. If there was one cell phone company that could actually provide consistently good quality cell phone service and keep those calls connected, customers would flock to them in record numbers. So why hasn’t it happened yet? Honestly it is because the vast majority of us just deal with it. We know it is unacceptable yet we accept it! Why??!!

Poor quality also infects software development. How many of us have just gotten used to programs freezing and not responding? Or operating systems ‘just dying’ and having to reboot the machine? A sad but true fact is that the majority of people tolerate poor quality because they feel they have no choice. If you change to a different program that one will just freeze or die in a different way.

It reminds me of the automotive industry in the United States about 40 years ago. At the time you could buy a car from one of the ‘Big Three’ auto makers or from small foreign car makers. There wasn’t a huge difference in quality at the time. However, at about that time several foreign car makers made a concerted effort to improve quality. The ‘Big Three’ laughed and thought there was no way the foreign car makers would ever make a serious dent in their bottom line. This was America and Americans buy American. But that did not prove to be the case. Americans proved to be like everyone else in the world – they wanted good value for their money and they wanted quality. It turned out that where it came form didn’t mean as much as was thought. By the time the American auto makers realized they were in trouble, it was too late. They had suffered a loss that they may never recover from. Sure, they continue to sell cars but their reputation is forever tarnished.

A s you look at the software landscape, are there companies out there that are going to put quality first and force people to take a stand? Is it possible to achieve with software what some auto makers have achieved in the auto industry? There are behemoths in the software industry that seem indestructible – can they be toppled by the little guy who actually makes a better product? At what point will we stand up and say we are not to going to accept the unacceptable?

(For the record – while I was writing this blog my browser inexplicably just shut down and the word processing software I was using stopped recognizing lower case letters for no known reason and had to be restarted.)

~ Lawrence Nuanez