What if your car behaved like your computer?
You buy a new car. You had a test drive and it
drove well: that's why you bought it. And for the first few weeks it is fine,
just as the salesman said it would be. Then, things begin to change. Suddenly
the car slows down, you push on the accelerator, but the car still slows down. Then
all the dashboard displays dim out. Suddenly, miraculously, everything is OK
again and you are on your way.
No worries,
just a glitch perhaps. Then it happens again and again. You take the car back
to the garage, but the mechanics can't find anything wrong and snidely infer
that there is something wrong with your driving.
You drive home sadly, and the slowing down starts
again. You drive straight back to the garage where the mechanics greet you with
a scowl - yet still they can find nothing wrong, even on a test drive.
You learn to live with the car's strange
behaviour. What else can you do? Then something else develops. The car still behaves
erratically, but also its top speed decreases as time goes by so that you are
crawling along the road, overtaken by bicycles and joggers. The mechanics
examine the car and accuse you of overloading it: too many passengers, too much
shopping.
Finally, you buy a new car, what else can you do?
Then the same cycle begins all over again.
Some years ago Bill Gates reportedly compared the
computer industry with the auto industry stating, "If General Motors had
kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving
$25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."
GM responded with a long list of outcomes if
Microsoft made cars, including:
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash
twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the
road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway
for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the
windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could
continue.
So much of this is still true today - and the
worrying thing is that a computer now controls most of the functions of the
car.
Actually, I do not hate computers. I have grown up
with them. Indeed I programmed one that controlled a telephone exchange many
years ago (it rarely crashed once we had removed most of the bugs). A computer
is just a machine, it does what it is told and rarely goes wrong. Unfortunately,
the software that tells it what to do does go wrong and it is that which, over time,
causes the enraging slowness that plagues most PC's. Problems like these bring
out the witch doctors of course, but the spells they cast are temporary and the
problems recurrent. In the end you buy a new machine with new software and
begin the whole cycle again.
As you might guess, I am nearing that point just
now - probably for the fifth or sixth time.
