A disturbing trend I have been noticing in the last 4 years or so is the general decline in the quality of hardware components released to the market.
Quality may be too broad a term; functionality may be a better fit for my point. Electrically, I believe component quality has improved. It is in the firmware and drivers, the final implementation, that I see the decline. The consumer’s perception of quality is the total package; why it won’t work makes little difference. If any piece of the functionality puzzle is missing, the whole product is perceived as defective.
Missing, incomplete features, incomplete standards implementation, glaring errors and blue screening drivers are becoming much more common. Frequent motherboard BIOS updates to fix critical bugs, not to add features, are common.
To be fair, the world of computers has become much more complex at the system level. This is not an excuse as the tools to develop solutions have become better also. It seems that in the rush to get the new model out the door the necessary development and quality control steps are being skimped on. It is also common that in the race to get something new out, the willingness to go back and fix things that should have been done properly in the 1st place is declining.
This may be due to the disturbing trend of companies becoming fragmented. R&D, QA, marketing and support aren’t working together as they should. They are separate departments, with separate budgets that do not seem to be viewed as part of the whole. Departments are at odds against each other with an “over the wall” mentality instead of working together. If R&D gets a product out on schedule and on budget, trumpets sound, kudos are given, people are promoted. If consumers have issues with that same product, tech support is blamed, budgets are reviewed and outsourcing commences. With the outsourced “complaint trap”, associated scripts to be read by unknowledgeable people and touch tone phone mazes in place, resolving the problem becomes so painful for the consumer that they eventually give up and go away, vowing never to purchase brand X again. That is until brand Y does the same thing to them and they give brand X a try again, hoping things have gotten better.
What’s a small System Integrator or repair shop to do to protect themselves from these problems? Don’t take the marketing blurbs and spec sheets at face value, test it for yourself. If you build systems, ensure that the components you use perform as they should before they go out to the client site. Remember that if a system fails at a clients premises it will be viewed as your fault. They wrote the check to you not to ACME card manufacturer and they expect you to provide them a working product. If you are a repair shop, use quality tools to diagnose issues so you have empirical data to back up your fixes. With the myriad of possible problems in the interaction between hardware, firmware, drivers and software, ferreting out intermittent or even constant problems is difficult without the proper tools.
What are the proper tools to use? PC-Doctor of course! Use the DOS version to directly test the hardware and firmware for compliance and functionality, then the Windows version to test the driver and hardware interaction. With this two-prong approach you can be reasonably certain you have covered all the bases. I admit I am a little biased as I work for PC-Doctor as a senior QA engineer but, I would not say it if it were not so. I ran my own system integration company for over 20 years. Over these years I tried a lot of products and went to great lengths to cobble together something that would give me a sense of comfort about the systems we were building. Everything needed to accomplish this is included with PC-Doctor. PC-Doctor saved me a lot of time and aggravation, I wish I would have known about it sooner.
-Fred Wilson
