Bugs: "a change in what the market expects." (interview with BugNet editor Bruce Brown)(Interview)

Talk about catching a wave: Two weeks after launching a newsletter that reported on buggy software and hardware, BugNet editor Bruce Brown woke up to find that a glitch in Intel's Pentium processor had suddenly transformed defective code into a national scandal. Within six months, says Brown, the BugNet audience had grown (largely through CompuServe and newspaper syndication deals) to some four million readers a month.

Brown, who once authored a comic cult novel called "Dr. Whacko's Guide to Slow-Pitch Softball," takes software code quality very seriously. "Bugs and compatibility are going to be the software issues of the '90s," he insists. Brown assiduously collects bug reports, mostly from on-line forums, and publishes a regular "Fix/Bug Ratio Chart" that tracks how promptly software vendors issue patches. We recently asked Brown about the emergence of bugs as a high profile issue:

Bruce, when you look at the hundreds of individual bugs you've tracked, does any software company stand out for especially poor response?

"It's hard (and unfair) to make a simple declaration concerning the worst offender in bugdom because there are so many variables. Within the last year, for instance, CorelDraw 5 and Peachtree Accounting for Windows 3 have had an unusually high number of bugs. But in both cases, the vendors made an exceptional effort to address their bug problems. As a result, Corel has always scored well in the Fix/Bug Ratio Chart, even though the numbers of reported bugs was high.

"Novell WordPerfect, on the other hand, has recently established itself as the industry leader in providing immediate fixes for bugs--but among the bugs reported for WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows, a surprising percentage involve GPFs, or total meltdowns.

"Then there's Microsoft. It's clearly the class act among software firms when it comes to fighting bugs, but the company rarely sends out free disks with fixes. And it let the Windows calculator bug languish unfixed for two years."

Many of the glitches you report really turn out to be hardware or system compatibility issues, which are notoriously hard to spot even with the most sophisticated testing tools. Is the PC environment getting too complex for reliable software?

"I think we're just seeing the normal rise and fall of a virtual tide. Do you remember what a big deal 100-percent IBM compatibility was a decade ago? At one point, Lotus warned 1-2-3 users that switching between DOS 1.1 and 2.0 could result in `serious data loss.' Over the last decade in the PC world, vendors have succeeded in pushing these sort of compatibility issues to the back burner.

"However, the coming of Windows 95 has brought the compatibility issue back to life. Despite the tremendous effort Microsoft has put into plug-and-play and backwards compatibility, there will inevitably be whole classes of software and hardware that will not fit well into Windows 95, if at all (16-bit screen savers and some tape backups among them).

"At the same time, the PC has been evolving from a techie tool to a mainstream appliance. As the flameup over installation bugs in Disney's Lion King CD-ROM at Christmas made clear, there's been a change in what the market expects about software and hardware compatibility."

But consumers also seem to be up in arms about genuinely obscure bugs, like the Pentium's floating-point glitch, that have no impact on what people do with their PCs.

"The Intel Pentium hardware bug really was minor compared to many software bugs that users wrestle with every day. But ultimately, the Pentium scandal was really about trust, faith, and the appearance of fairness."

Bruce Brown, editor, BugNet, CompuServe 71630,3644.