During the GFC, everyone was looking for whipping boys to blame for what happened. The two favourites were banks and the car industry. Banks copped a serve for irresponsible lending practices, while the carmakers got it in the neck for laying off workers in the thousands and then rather inappropriately letting their CEOs charter a private jet to fly to Washington to lobby for government aid.
I'm not saying that these industries weren't culpable and to a large degree, they deserve a lot of the new regulation that has been imposed on them. However, in their defence, at least their products WORK. If you buy a car, you can be reasonably assured of driving it home without the engine seizing up or one of the wheels falling off. Similarly, if you go into a bank and withdraw money from an ATM, hey presto, the machine will dispense the cash you ask for. Sadly, as anyone who has ever bought a new computer knows, this is simply not the case with anything produced by the IT industry. Which is why they deserve a huge kick in the pants from governments worldwide so that they are forced to atone for the untold misery they have caused their customers.
Listen to this anecdote and see if it sounds familiar. About a year ago, my wife and I bought a new Lenovo laptop computer (yes, I'm prepared to name and shame). We took it home, tried to set up a home wireless network then quickly worked out that something was wrong as the laptop wouldn't pick up the internet if it were more than 2 metres away from the desktop computer. After ringing the "help desk" and being put through to somewhere in the US or Canada, we were told it had a faulty antenna and we should post it up to a service company in Sydney. This we did, only to wait 4 weeks without hearing a peep. When we tried to track the computer down, we were again put through to Canada, where the disembodied voice I spoke to told me he would have to get someone in China to call me. I offered to bet the voice $10,000 that no-one in China would ever call me, but being American, he didn't understand the sarcasm.
Of course, the bet turned out to be a good one and in frustration I asked the service company to locate the computer and return it to me so I could take it back to the store. When I did get the computer back I was told I couldn't get a refund because the computer was under warranty for 2 years - even though they'd already demonstrated monumental incompetence by completely failing to fix the problem ! With steam coming out my ears I phoned a different Lenovo number with the intention of complaining until I was blue in the mouth, only to be again re-routed to another disembodied voice in Canada. Fortunately this voice had a brain larger than your average peanut and was able to fix the problem for me. It wasn't a faulty antenna at all, it was an incorrect configuration which was able to be rectified by typing in "$%56#r3tpxxx!//" or something equally counter-intuitive in at the DOS-prompt. Now being able to access the internet, I immediately set to writing a stinging e-mail to Lenovo only to be stymied by the fact that what was represented as the "@" key on the keypad was in fact the "%" key, thereby necessitating a search to find what key was in fact the correct one. This turned out to be the "$" key, which was itself having an identity crisis with the "?" key. It was around this time that I burst into tears.
That computer aged me 5 years. Its crapulence was boundless. I hated it so much that when it got stolen from our luggage en route from JFK back to Melbourne I nearly threw a party. Yet time and again, the people who run these companies serve up this rubbish and as consumers, we just roll our eyes and cop it. It's not good enough, and it's time for this fraud on the public to stop.
I personally find it staggering that regulators aren't awake to what's going on. Aren't they aware of the armies of people employed by organisations just to keep their IT infrastructure going? Again, drawing a comparison with automobiles, if cars broke down as often as computers, there would have to be 500 times as many mechanics as are currently employed in this country. In fact, every CBD carpark of any size would probably need to employ 4-5 full time mechanics just to ensure that everyone could get their vehicles started to get home. As a society would we put up with cars that were so unreliable, with all the safety and time consequences that would cause? Of course not, we would demand much better. So why do we accept that IT glitches are a necessary evil in life?
I think part of the answer is because when computer systems DO work properly, they are so useful and positive for productivity that we are prepared to put up with a bit of inconvenience for the benefits they bring. This would be fine, except now because of the fact that computers are so useful, they have become so ubiquitous that when they do fail, productivity grinds to a halt. I know when the business I work in changed hands recently and the team had to get 150 new staff onto the company's server, it meant we were without e-mail or other vital applications for the best part of 2 days. This is not to denigrate the team who did the job as they did a stellar job in the circumstances but it does highlight how dangerously reliant we have become on technology.
Any technological innovation throughout history always comes with teething problems. Certainly cars weren't as reliable back in Henry Ford's time, and new medicines can often have unfortunate side-effects that no-one could have predicted based on what was known at the time. The same is true of the computing industry but surely now the devices have been around long enough that reliability can be improved and they can be made more user-friendly? Surely also governments need to recognise the waste and frustration everyone suffers as a result of IT glitches and start sanctioning the industry for failing to deliver products to acceptable standards. I feel so strongly about this that I would probably even vote for John Howard if he agreed to address the problem. But then it would probably turn out to be a "non-core" promise, so I would wind up getting shafted both ways.
On one positive note, I see that Bill Gates has effectively pledged most of his ill-gotten gains towards ridding the world of malaria. If he is successful, and if heaven and hell do exist, then he might (just might) get away with 10,000 years in purgatory as opposed to eternal damnation for all the misery caused to the public by Word, Outlook and most particularly, Powerpoint.
Thanks for hearing me out. I'm now off to re-boot my temper.
