If you have, I'm sure you long for the day I do, when computer and software companies that inflict more pain of these dimensions on consumers than any other industry are flattened by the competitor they so richly deserve -- the cyber equivalent of the AK-47. That's the Automat Kalashnikov 1947, the rifle that for roughly half a century has continued to outsell all its rivals -- including its chief American competitor, the M16 -- around the world.

The AK-47 has every attribute of products I love best. Type the name of this assault weapon into Google and you'll find site after site listing the same shining virtues: little changed from the original model, the AK-47 and its derivatives are deliberately simple in design, therefore easily and inexpensively manufactured -- and above all, reliable, the reason why an estimated 40 million of them have been made so far. For many years, the far more complicated M16 -- packed with innovations -- was famous mostly for jamming.

It hardly requires a shrink to explain why someone like me -- who ordinarily finds the very idea of guns nauseating -- should enjoy conjuring up the arms business when reminded that American computer companies are fully aware of the glitchiness of their products and don't care.

I'm not talking about planned obsolescence, the (dubious) idea that shortened life spans have to be built into industrial products to ensure that industries have enough customers to stay alive.

I am talking, for instance, about the unsurprising message in PC World's July issue -- based on responses from 16,000 subscribers -- that computer owners are having more trouble than ever with their machines, and that very few of them are happy with these products or the quality of service from their makers. In analysing repair histories of 13 kinds of products gathered by Consumer Reports, PC World found that roughly 22 percent of computers break down every year -- compared to 9 percent of VCRs, 7 percent of big-screen TVs, 7 percent of clothes dryers and 8 percent of refrigerators.

I am talking about a study of personal-computer failure rates by the Gartner Group discovering that there was a failure rate of 25 percent for notebook computers used in large American corporations. "That means one out of four notebooks will fail in a given year," says Kevin Knox, a technical director at Gartner, who believes that that rate has in all likelihood increased since the study was done three years ago.

None of this is accidental. A culture of carelessness seems to have taken over in high-tech America. The personal computer is a shining model of unreliability because the high-tech industry today actually exalts sloppiness as a modus operandi.

Not long ago, Silicon Valley marketing guru and venture capitalist Regis McKenna -- for whom I was editing a book -- told me that high-tech leaders who had once made pilgrimages to Japan to understand quality circles and other tools of quality control had lost interest in those buzzwords of the 1980s. They had come to see their product reliability problems as an inevitable side effect of what they excelled at -- innovation at top speed.

"'Act fast and fix the problems later' is how we operate here," Regis said. He showed me a Stanford Computer Industry Project study whose conclusion was that Japan would always lag behind America in software innovation and sales because of a business culture in which perfectionism is rampant. Unlike Japanese computer companies hobbled by elaborate quality control and testing procedures, the Stanford researchers found, American companies accept "good enough" quality for the sake of speed. Being first to market with new products is exalted as the highest goal here, and companies fall back on huge technical support and customer service staffs to cope with their many errors of commission and omission.

"Don't worry, be crappy," was how Silicon Valley veteran and pundit Guy Kawasaki expressed the same idea two years ago, in a speech that won him a standing ovation. He explained to his audience of 1,000 entrepreneurs that revolutionary products don't have to be fault-free: "Do not believe that the first version has to be perfect. If the software industry were honest, they would tell you the algorithm is: ship, then test."

But what does the personal computer industry mean when it says "first version"? Seemingly, anything. The new features crammed into virtually every product and every software release could put most of our significant computer-related purchases into that category.

The Free Software Project
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