Someone Else

Just because you're used to an abusive relationship, it doesn't make it OK.

I have to admit that some areas of the computer industry make me asahmed to be part of the IT profession at times.

Take gaming - 1up.com's article on 5 botched game launches talks about Steam...

Yes, yes, we all love Steam now.

By which we mean "It hasn't gone away yet, and people won't visit our site if we don't talk about Valve". 

It's the model of digital distribution and community management in PC gaming right now

By which we mean "We're high." 

utterly shaming Microsoft's embarrassingly inept Games for Windows Live initiative.

When you're standing in a barrel of crap, the fact that someone else is in it deeper than you doesn't alter the fact that you're standing in a barrel of crap.

But back in the day, we were even harsher on Valve than we now are on Microsoft -- because the official launch of Steam on November 16, 2004, which coincided with the launch of Half-Life 2, was an utter nightmare. Or at least it seemed that way at the time.

It didn't "seem" like it, it was. I remember being really excited to have the game in my hands at last. I remember buying it over the counter and rushing home to play it, and I definitely remember sitting around for ages waiting for Steam to do its thing before I could actually play the game. Is it any wonder that I was underwhelmed by the game itself in the end after all the rubbish Valve had put me through to play it?

To be fair, some of what we complained about at the time was simply because we had never seen it before. Like, for example, a single-player game that required you to be online to play it. What seemed unreasonable and demanding back in the day is now more par for the course.

Which brings me to the title of the article... Just because you're used to having to be online at some stage during installing or playing a single player mode of a game it doesn't make it right. It just makes you used to the crap being shovelled at you by the vendor.

Asking me to be online to install or play a single-player game doesn't seem reasonable to me. It actually seems like some kind of unreasonable demand to me. I own the computer, I've purchased a licence to use the software already. Why do I need to go online and prove myself over and over again to the vendor? (Microsoft, I'm looking at you too)

Banning someone for life from playing the games they have paid for, simply for upsetting the system (no this has not happened to me before someone thinks I'm just being bitter at being caught cheating or something) doesn't seem reasonable to me.

Charging someone the same sort of price for a digital distribution of a game that they'd pay in the shops to actually receive something tangible doesn't seem reasonable to me. And I'm not the only one.

That said, the initial launch was a disaster, with Valve's servers backed up and crashing due to bottlenecks and general instability, making it literally impossible for many players -- whether they'd bought a boxed copy or a direct download -- to validate and play Half-Life 2.

And herein lies another problem. No matter how robust the Steam infrastructure is, it is still another layer of code and systems that all need to be working correctly and available for users to use the products they have paid for. I'm not saying that Steam is still unreliable, I'm saying that "more complex" is inherently more prone to problems than "simple". 

Yes, gamers finally had the most anticipated PC game in years in their hot little hands, but they couldn't play it because the online validation was busted. As an advertisement for Valve's new distribution system, you couldn't have asked for anything worse. Since then, of course, Valve has gone out of their way to fix and improve Steam, and now we can't imagine living without it.

By which we mean "Our imagination has atrophied. Perhaps we've played too many first person shooters based on WW2." 

I've not purchased a Valve game since Half Life 2, which I actually gave away rather than play it again. I seem to be doing OK considering. Valve make great games but I'm not prepared to put up with the price of having steam on my computer.

This brings us on to Microsoft.

I know I've used them as a virtual punching bag a lot recently but they do seem to sit up and beg for it. Frankly it isn't a question of what to write about them but rather where to start. I've already mentioned WGA above, and this is a good example of a product module that reduces the reliability of the product simply by existing.

WGA is also a very good example of punishing your paying customers for the actions of others; the big pirate rings have hacked versions of XP, Vista, Office and anything else you want all lined up and able to install without having to mess around obtaining "permission" to use something you've already paid for. Who gets inconvenienced by WGA and product activation if the real pirates have bypassed it?

Another problem with Microsoft recently is that the quality of their products have become very erratic of late. I love Office 2007 myself but too many people out there are having problems with it to say that it's been a major success. And let's not even get started on Office 2008... We're looking at rolling that out at work for our Mac users and I've honestly been shocked at how poor Office 2008 performs on the newest Macs and stunned at the amount of odd lockups and crashes I've seen with it. If I create a fresh install of Leopard and Office 2008 is the first thing installed onto it and it still crashes then I think I'm on safe ground when I call it a lemon.

Office 2008 arrived on a Select DVD so it must be a finished product, but going by how it behaves and performs I'd expect it to be an early beta, and not one the product team ought to make public either. 

Lastly on the subject of Microsoft. Oh boy. This just keeps getting worse doesn't it? So not only were Microsoft execs aware of problems with Vista performance on even new hardware because they themselves got burned by it, but they actually colluded with Intel to make the issue happen, and to hell with us customers. Outstanding. That's just a big bravo right there to the pair of them. I know that Vista bashing is hardly original these days, and I know that I've done so much of it myself that it must be boring the people who read this blog to tears by now but really this stuff just writes itself. Apple's Leopard has been criticised for a few bugs and rough patches at launch time but it's been a roaring success for Apple because all it had to do was suck a little bit less than Vista... and Leopard has managed that easily, even if you treat the problems with Vista in the most favourable way possible and treat the problems with OS X 10.5/Leopard in the worst way possible. At the very least, as someone who owns a Vista Ultimate licence, I'd like to ask 'Where are all those Ultimate Extras I was promised'?

Who else is on my chopping block today? How about Sony?

If I didn't know better, I'd swear that "Sony" was Japanese for either "Welcome to our world of stupidity" or "We hate our customers and we're proud of it".

I mean, first we've got their rootkit issues from a while ago (this persuaded me to add Sony to my boycott list). 

Then we've got the Blu-Ray price hikes now the competition is killed off. I know this is hardly uncommon in a monopoly type situation but most players have the good grace to be subtle about doing this, you know, introducing a product update that lets them change things without being too obvious about it. 

Then most recently we've had the issues with crapware on Sony machines coming to the forefront, with Sony USA having the sheer cheek to try and charge customers an extra $50 to un-install the junk from their new Sony computer so that it actually works properly. The most priceless part, of course, is when they got caught with their hand in the cookie-jar they produced the most weasel-worded comment since... well I'm guessing since Sony BMG got caught installing rootkits on peoples computers.

“We heard the message loud and clear, (...) VAIO is the poster child for negative experiences people had [with trialware]. We recognize that, and we acknowledge it. We’ve been really beat up by this issue. We’re listening and we’re taking action.” - Mike Abary, Senior Vice President of the VAIO division talking to Ed Bott of ZDNet.

If you "recognize" the issue then why are you doing it in the first place Mr Abary? Why did you try and rip customers off further by cashing in on something you "acknowledge" is a problem? Why did you wait to get caught before "taking action"?

And, Mr Abary, your final question is "Why should anyone in their right mind believe any rubbish that dribbles out of the mouths of you or any other Sony representative ever again, and why should any one out here in customer-land buy a Sony product ever again after your company has continually been caught spitting at its customers?".

Of course, I'm quite well aware that Sony are not the only guilty party when it comes to loading rubbish onto new computers. But something about the extra-cynical way that Sony goes about larding their new computers down with so many of these extras, charges a premium for the product because they are a premium manufacturer (hence negating the usual counter-argument that these things are needed due to slim margins in the hardware industry) and then is cynical enough to charge you even more money once again to give you control of your own computer just sticks in my throat that bit more than some of the other guilty parties, who at least have the good grace to look embarrassed about what they're doing.

Let's finish with some examples of bad ethics on a much smaller scale.

G-Archiver is a program that backs up messages from your g-mail account to your computer. It's not free, users have to pay a small amount to purchase it if they want to use it. I can't say it's ever interested me, but I suspect it's been very useful indeed to those people who do need it.

Imagine that this program that you paid good money for was stealing your email username and password. Horrible idea isn't it? Sadly, this turned out to be reality. Jeff Atwood published an article detailing this very big problem on his superb coding horror website after a reader emailed Jeff telling him about the problem (further writeups on other sites here and here).

Of course, the people behind G-Archiver didn't ignore this big threat to customer security or confidence in their business, springing into action they posted the following:

What happened with G-Archiver?

It has come to our attention that a flaw in the coding of G-Archiver may have revealed customer's Gmail account usernames and passwords.

It is urgent that you remove the current version of G-Archiver from your computer, and change your Gmail account password right away.

What happened was that a member of our development team had inserted coding used for testing G-Archiver in the debug version and forgot to delete it in the final release version.

We sincerely apologize and assure you that this coding mishap was in no way intentional.

We'll be releasing a new version that corrects the flaw in version 1.0. The new version will be available very soon.

I'm not sure who composed that but if they visit my site I'd like to ask them: "Have you ever considered a job at Sony?". I reckon they'd be perfect for it. Still the main thing is they issued an apology and a warning. Of course, it's hidden behind a small link on their main page with nothing to communicate the urgency of the article, and at the time of writing it's not linked to from their "FAQ" or "Help" pages, but I'm sure they're sincere.

Now Jeff links to the Association for Computing Machinery's code of ethics as part of his article, and as a member of the British Computer Society, a similar professional organisation for IT professionals in the UK, I can easily point you to a similar page on the BCS website. 

What do you think? Taking those two "code of ethics" pages and thinking about what they say, do you think that Valve, Sony, Microsoft or the people behind G-Archiver meet those standards? When you stop and think about things, do they meet your standards for someone you want to do business with, or are you just so used to being treated badly that you don't notice any more?