Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!acorn!steve
From: steve@acorn.co.uk (Steve "Daffy" Hunt)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: MIT bashing (deprecating same)
Message-ID: <845@acorn.co.uk>
Date: 2 Oct 89 13:36:57 GMT
References: <8909262214.AA12219@internal.apple.com> <714@odin.SGI.COM>
Reply-To: steve@acorn.UUCP (Steve "daffy" Hunt)
Organization: Acorn Computers Ltd, Cambridge, UK
Lines: 16

In article <714@odin.SGI.COM> paquin@kahua.esd.sgi.com (Tom Paquin) writes:
>
>Something I learned a long time ago at IBM (of all places) is that the
>quality of software is directly (*not* indirectly) proportional to
>"maintenance" demands made on it.  The better the software, the more
>people use it, and the more they care about the nuances of its use.
>Software of lesser usefulness or quality is quietly unused, or,
>worse, tolerated for very short necessary bursts.  

Incorrect.  Usefulness and quality are not the same thing.  Consider
MS-DOS, one of the most widely-used pieces of software in the world.
High-quality?  Hardly.

The number of people using a piece of software is might be related to
its usefulness, but the proportion of those users who complain about
it is related to its quality.