HP-35s New Moon Lander behavior

[burkhard]

(04-27-2019 01:40 AM)mfleming Wrote:  Complaints about the 35S bugs come up on a periodic basis and on one of the many iterations I remember Tim W. giving a reason why the code was not corrected by the HP team. IIRC code development was contracted out to a Chinese firm that delivered no documentation on completion, only sparsely comment source code. Commented in Chinese.

Well, sure, and as an engineer myself I'm quite sympathetic to the engineers at HP who see the fruit of their labors out there with deficiencies that could have been easily fixed years ago if not for a very poorly-conceived business arrangement executed by HP management. Anything involving a lot of complicated software never comes out 100% bug-free on the first build... or even the tenth build. It's wholly unreasonable to expect that. There needs to be a means to roll out corrections during the product life cycle. You shouldn't continue to put out flawed product for years (this model entered production in 2007 and they are still making it with the same bugs!) when you know how to fix it. It only hurts your brand equity.

In today's global business environment, of course there are manufacturing and sometimes even design and development arrangements made between firms. At the end of the day, though, if your company name is on it, you cannot forsake a means of bug-correction during the normal product life-cycle. There needs to be a provision for occasional updates to fix problems. You can't just throw it over the wall and let somebody else turn the crank for 10 or 15 years and then make excuses about why it "can't" be fixed. Bullshit. If that is so, somebody at HP entered into a horrible business arrangement. I am very glad they did not take that approach with the Prime.