On the one hand I've been pretty good over the years with social and technological evolution. On the other hand I really don't understand why humanity is still in business forty years after the development of fusion weapons. I'm clearly missing something there.
Grains of salt advised. Anyway ...
My intuition is telling me that we have a 21st century "crisis of quality". I think this is related to some of my favorite themes, such as fraud (see esp. 21st century deception) and reputation management. It's demonstrated in the failures of the publicly traded company, our food and imported quality problems, and, I believe, the reelection of George Bush.
It may have its roots in anonymity, transience, and complexity.
Take my last week in the world of software and hardware for example:
- I spend an hour or so playing with Google's vaunted custom search only to discover their newest feature doesn't work.
- a trivially obvious bug in iPhoto 7 (iLife '08) destroys 3 family videos
- I discover you can't fully revert from Microsoft's buggy Office 2007 to their less buggy Office 2003
- I give up on my corporate XP box and rebuild, unable even now to say if the problem was hardware or software - or some interaction of flaws in both.
- I discover an emergent bug with IMAP interactions between multiple simultaneous user sessions of OS X Mail.app and Google's GMail implementation.
That's a bad week.
Apple has a quality problem. Microsoft has a quality problem. Google has a quality problem.
The entire human world has a quality problem.
Except I seem to be the only one who's complaining.
Anyone else notice anything?
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