Software Quality -- NOT!

I run the Symantec "One Button Checkup" on a regular automatic schedule. Every time it says: "Program Integrity Scan: 12 errors fixed". Run it again and it says the same thing.

Today a program was complaining that there was no medium in the DVD/CD drive. The program was OBC.exe. The same program. Why would it care that I had no CD or DVD mounted? Just trying to annoy me.

In all fairness, System Mechanic 7, tells me that it has 4 security items that it can fix. It churns away and says I still have 4 security items that it can fix. It never gives a clue as to what it thinks the problems are. Grand.

Meanwhile, in developing software using Microsoft Access, I find that I need to hire an assistant to click the Save icon every time I add a control to a form, or try dragging a group of controls around the screen. Access panics with a lame "Microsoft Access has encountered a problem and needs to close". I can get this message with good certainty by asking Access to Compact and Repair my database file. It's interesting that the message makes it sound as though it is doing you a favor by pointing out an error. It's not my error it has encountered.

"Microsoft Access has encountered a problem and needs to close" happens so often with any of the Office programs and even the older Visual Studio 6 (circa 1998), that I have a Google alert set up to let me know if others are tortured by this. Yes, others are, as a matter of fact. There are no published work-arounds that I've found. It's pretty clear that Microsoft doesn't have any intention of fixing the problems. They expect you to upgrade to the latest ver$ion. The latest Google alert was from somebody who had written an applicaton in Access 2003 and tried running a report under Access 2007. Same error message. Microsoft's "solution" to the problem was utter nonsense and not really practical. It would have been more helpful for them to just say, "Go away, sucker."

Software Quality is not a goal of the now-huge software companies. Open source software, freeware, and shareware not only is much more reliable, but the developer will appreciate knowing about problems so they can fix them. Microsoft wants you to pay for support.