Corporate Posturing

In our modern world, posturing has become more prevalent than actual deals.  We posture to get the attention of customers.  We posture to get sales.  We posture to keep customers.

My question is: Why do we focus so much on perceptions and so little on product quality and the reality of the work involved to bring a good product to market?

I am a software developer and simply put good software is hard to write.  It isn’t that getting it to work is hard, if it were then I should be doing something else.  The difficulty comes in accounting for all the possible workflows and for all the small details that can derail things.

For example, you have a field that a user can type in a money amount in.  You have to be able to handle dozens of input formats (with commas, without, with the symbol for the currency, without and so on), you then have to be able to tell the user in a way that does not frustrate them if they typed in something that you can’t handle (like all letters).  That can take a while to go through and account for.

Now take that example and multiply the work by the number of fine interaction points that exist in your product and you have the time it would take to code the product.  This is of course an oversimplification, but the concept applies in general production of products as well.  The same can be said of the little change tray in cars.  It should be big enough for most coins in the world, small enough to not inconvenience the user,  sturdy enough to last as long as the car, aesthetic enough to not be an eyesore and the list goes on and on.

The reality is that most product do not go through all of this to be made and that is why we have recalls on cars due to gas pedals that can jam, software patches (now common even among console video games and mobile phone software) and free straps for Wii motes after some people put theirs through their big screen TVs.

What causes this rush and carelessness on the part of gigantic companies?  The market of course.  We want the fancy new sprocket that will make our life better and we want it yesterday.  Oh, and if it could possible cost us no money, that would be swell.  So, what we end up with is lots of crappy products that we are never happy with because they were not allowed to bake long enough.

I think that as a society, we need to learn patience.  That new phone that will enrich your life can probably stand to be in development for another year, so when it comes out, it is twice as sturdy and three times as optimized.  That new car should probably not go into production within 3 years of its concept phase or we might end up with some people wrapped around trees (and not in the tree-hugger sense).

Medical studies have shown that people with a lower stress level live longer, so why don’t we all take a step back and just slow down when it comes to personal products, we will probably get higher quality stuff that we can enjoy for a longer period of time.