Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Incompetence, mark … whatever …

It seems that the never ending stream of mistakes cannot be stemmed any more. The latest is the venerable Wii, a simplistic console if ever there was one. Only the new “U” model has had a launch that makes Windows 8 look like a darling Smile

The Wii, it seems, takes an hour to apply the first update. Huh? Since when does a few patches take that long? Well, anyone who has used a PS3 knows the sting of incompetence only too well. That thing updates itself all the time, and they make it unbelievably complicated and slow.

Apparently, Nintendo wanted to join the “stupid” party … where updates are not small patches, but rather wholesale swap outs of the software.

I know this song. It happens when software teams concentrate on everything except their build and deployment technology, which they hack together in the crudest possible way. That slows them down, and it slows every consumer in the world down.

It is so tiresome to see fundamental mistakes harm otherwise good products and waste so many peoples’ time unnecessarily. Boo on Nintendo, and boo on Sony for the PS3 update system. And while I’m handing out raspberries, boo on Microsoft for Windows 8’s issues with the desktop and Metro interactions. Would it really have been so difficult to allow us to pin Metro apps on one monitor and Windows 7 apps on the other? That would make so much more sense than the mess they shipped …