Leading on from the previous rant about people trying to divert attention from the real issue in debates, this months .net magazine gets a look at.

In the “the Big Question” section it outlines a quote from the Wall Street Journal which quotes Peter Sealey as saying he knows of “no other industry where marketers knowingly introduce a flawed product.” Now Mr Sealey is currently a marketing professor at UCSB and was the chief marketing officer at Coca-cola.

Overall, the “talking heads” (typing heads?) who reply give a reasonable description of the issues involved. None really justify the eternal-beta some software companies live in (can you hear this Google?) but one is interesting.
From the CEO of Actinic (Chris Barling) –

“If we ever needed evidence that executives at large corporations don’t get technology, even if they become professors, here it is.”
Wow. Is Actinic not a large corporation? Is CEO not an executive? Is this any rebuttal of the original statement, or is this just an attempt (somewhat similar to the “Brit snob” we looked at last time!) to discredit the person who made the original comment before trying to wheedle out of a response? In the interests of fair play, Mr Barling does try to explain the reason behind beta testing – although he never fully covers the issues about why some products in beta are sold – not simply made available for testing ala sourceforge.

Maths Humour – He does say it is “mathematically impossible” to fully test software as there are “millions of possible” combinations. The number of combinations does not make it impossible, simply difficult and more importantly expensive …… I wonder if this is what he defines “impossible” as?