Anyone else have a problem with this?

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Unfair as it is, it's still going to cost Toyota jobs, market share, and $billions. My point is simply that perceptions matter.

They do matter and get managed very effectively in our modern communication environment. To whatever effect the ones who have the interest and powers do want.

Good product with a bad rep would be Microsoft, Apple, or Linux (take your pick). Bad product with a good rep... things don't work in that direction for long.

I think this list shows one thing mainly. Once you are up in the list of the major players there is no way to avoid being called bad by some.

As to the original topic which started this thread: NI did word that part about the SP1 release not being for free quite badly. To me it does show that NI is still not a company only driven by marketing alone.

As to the question if SPs should be for free or should be only part of an upgrade or paid maintenance plan I do not have a strong opinion. Of course freebes are always nice, but I can also understand that they decided to consider this as a new minor version that requires some form of compensation. It will cost them some legitimate users for sure but I'm sure someone made up the calculation and decided that a new user paying for a license once and then never again has a lower return of investment than one who maintains a support service contract. That is not bad, just business. If you want to change that you have to change the way business is done everywhere nowadays

Also this business model gives more room for a competitor to actually come up with a product that could compete with LabVIEW.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Speaking of which, can anyone remember when the definition of the word "quality" changed from "it's a good product" to "it's an exact duplicate of the previous one"? The ISO quality standard is about that something is guaranteed to be made to a spec and a process, not about whether it's something that is function or will last. It seems that there's more concentration these days on verification, yet little on validation. Or, at least, some companies seem to interpret validation only as it applies to verification.

It's not very surprising. Different people have often very different ideas about what is good and bad. We all grow up with this fuzzy idea that good and bad are some absolute state of everything, and fully believe in it. But you can't measure good and bad effectively. The only thing you can measure is if something adheres to some standard who everyone of course assumes to be good.

It leaves a shallow feeling about ISO quality certification and all that hype among common people and I think not without reason. It's abstract because it does not match our perception of good and bad, but it's the only way you can measure something objectively. As soon as you start to use good and bad you are in a subjective perception, no matter how hard you try.

[ASTDan]

It's not very surprising. Different people have often very different ideas about what is good and bad. We all grow up with this fuzzy idea that good and bad are some absolute state of everything, and fully believe in it. But you can't measure good and bad effectively. The only thing you can measure is if something adheres to some standard who everyone of course assumes to be good.

It leaves a shallow feeling about ISO quality certification and all that hype among common people and I think not without reason. It's abstract because it does not match our perception of good and bad, but it's the only way you can measure something objectively. As soon as you start to use good and bad you are in a subjective perception, no matter how hard you try.

I think the idea of quality is market driven. You want to make your products at a level that your customers trust your product will work as intended for a certain length of time. However not to high where it becomes cost prohibitive. That being said the market is constantly changing. There was mention of LabVIEW 5.1.1 being a stable version. However that version did not have Events, OOP, DAQmx, and a host of other features that we now consider essential. I think it is fair to say our expections of LabVIEW has risen over time.

I have an engineering school example. We had to design something for a machine design class. One of the concepts we were learning was MTBF (Mean time before failure). Well I designed something that had a MTBF of like 40 years. My professor came down on me hard for the following reasons: The cost to make this was HUGE, my part would weigh A LOT, and did the market really want something that lasted that long? Also if everyone bought one of my super great products what then? They didn't need anymore for 40 years!

Another example is a light bulb. I am sure a light bulb can be made to last 20 years. Are you willing to pay $20 it, or does paying $1 for a light bulb that lasts 3-5 good enough. From a company perspective having that replacement period 3-5 years is a nice revenue stream.

Another concept I found very interesting was the higher you go up the standard deviation curve (2,3,4 standard deviations) the cost to achieve this is exponential. Again is the market willing to bear these higher costs?

Different people have often very different ideas about what is good and bad

Luke = Good

Darth = Bad

Edited March 10, 2010 by ASTDan

[Cat]

Luke = Good

Darth = Bad

But after a lot of costly bug fixes, Darth = Good.

[crelf]

Ok, a buddy of mine in a Quality department just gave me the skinny:

quality = perceived as good

Quality = the same as the last one

Notice the capitalization there? I sure hope someone in a marketing department somewhere made a buttload of money off of that!

[hooovahh]

List them. Beta's count.

According to my registry the installed versions of LabVIEW are 6.0, 6.1, 7.1, 8.0, 8.2, 8.5, 8.6, and 2009, no betas.

[ASTDan]

But after a lot of costly bug fixes, Darth = Good.

He became Anikin again after the bug fixes.

Anikin = Good

Darth = Bad

Edited March 10, 2010 by ASTDan