Push Button Paradise

Micah Dubinko

Sun, 17 Jul 2005

Patternalia - Doctor, Doctor (Industry Pattern)

...computer systems are unreliable, notoriously so. Nevertheless, vendors push for regular subscription fees, either explicitly or implicitly through periodic updates. This pattern describes a solution to industry reliability problems.

Christopher Alexander's book (see links at the end), in pattern 47 Health Center states:

Hospitals put the emphasis on sickness. They are enormously expensive; they are inconvenient because they are too centralized; and they tend to create sickness, rather than to cure it, because doctors get paid when people are sick.

By contrast, in traditional Chinese medicine, people pay the doctor only when they are healthy; when they are sick, he is obliged to treat them, without payment. The doctors have incentives to keep people well.

If you work with any kind of computer technology, you probably cringed while reading the first paragraph of that quote, and marveled while reading the second. Nearly all computer users have had some frustrating experience; operating systems in particular being particularly prone to corruption, infection, infestation, DLL hell, and general gunking up. A spyware report for May 2005 (see links) reports:

Industry experts suggest that [spyware in general] may reside on up to 90 percent of all Internet-connected computers.

Also,

Excluding cookies, which are not such a serious problem as key logger programs or Trojan horses, more than 55% of corporate PCs contained unwanted programs.

Times are good for freelance PC technicians, but only because they--like the western doctor--put the emphasis on malfunction. The way modern computers are designed, they are nearly impossible to keep "healthy". USA Today ran a test by putting an unprotected Windows XP computer on the internet, and found it compromised in less than four minutes, less time than it would take to load the necessary patches even on a fast internet connection. A consultant with clients that pay only upon flawless operation of their computers would starve to death, assuming early insanity didn't set in first.

In a word, the computer systems we rely on from day to day are undependable, and users don't feel in control of their own data. Average users are scared to change any setting, for fear of really mucking things up. System or software upgrades are troublesome, and often result in lost or inaccessible data.

The solution lies in changing the ways in which software update "patches" get distributed, and the underlying economics. For example, whenever an externally-exploitable flaw is uncovered in a software package, the vendor should be required to physically send out replacement media with the fix. Simply making the repairs available on the web is not sufficient, because the flaw itself may make web access dangerous. For widely used programs like Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, this could cost millions of dollars per flaw, however this is another benefit, as it provides perhaps the greatest incentive to vendors to improve the quality of their product out the door.

Similarly, technical support options should never charge "per incident". If anything, a support agreement should charge more for smooth-running software.

Therefore:

Insist that software vendors ship new physical media immediately upon the release of new code that fixes a critical vulnerability, no matter how expensive such a policy is to them. Demand technical support that doesn't penalize users for flaws in the software.

Links:

Spyware report for May 2005

USA Today's computer compromised

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posted at: 21:24 | under: patternalia | 0 comment(s)