Why are computers so hard?
My father-in-law, an old main frame guy, while recently expressing his computer frustrations asked an interesting question. He asked why do people accept it? Meaning why are people, customers, complacent about shoddy software, complicated configurations etc… Being a computer professional, I reeled trying to defend that it has to do with the complicated nature of computers, cost of software development and unknown security vulnerabilities. But I stopped mid sentence realizing he was right. We as a generation have accepted that computers crash, weird things happen, it’s prohibitively costly to test every scenario. It has becomes a global joke yet we continue to accept it. We have given away our expectation of quality. And that is what makes computers hard for our parents generation.
