Consumer Products: When Software Bugs Bite

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>

January 16, 2003
Consumer Products: When Software Bugs Bite

By  Debbie Gage
<http://www.baselinemag.com/print_article/0,3668,a=35839,00.asp>

Maurice Bailey's Miele G885 SC dishwasher cleans dishes almost as
well as a human being. Its 10 separate programs control the washing
and drying of fine crystal and crusty pans. Its electronic controls
warn owners if the drain is blocked. It also carefully regulates both
the temperature and the consumption of water, something humans often
neglect to do.

Mechanically, the dishwasher has never failed. But it was rendered
useless after a power outage. Its software got knocked out. Bailey
pored over the manual and then spent half an hour on the phone with
customer service. Finally, Miele sent a technician to his house to
reboot Bailey's dishwasher.

"Software is so pervasive," says Bailey, a general partner in the
Bailey Group, which provides consulting services to technology
companies. "This is a great product when it works. But I think this
dishwasher is symptomatic of issues we are not aware of."

Miele declines comment. But many companies are exploring the
potential of software to improve products by making them more
durable. Software replaces knobs that break and mechanical parts that
wear out, and it allows customers to fix and add features without
buying a new machine. Software updates can be delivered to customers
over the Web.

However, software lags hardware as a reliable component of products.
And, analysts say, unless companies do a better job of testing and
developing software, problems like Bailey's will likely get worse.
Several analyst firms-including Patricia Seybold Group, ZapThink, and
Venture Development Corp.-blame the technology industry itself, which
is loosely regulated and tends to rush products to market to try to
gain market share.

Consider BMW and its luxury 745i sedan. First released in Europe in
November of 2001, the car contains around 70 microprocessors. Its
most striking feature, iDrive, is what Car and Driver magazine
classifies as a "miracle knob." This single element of the dashboard
is designed, through a computerized console, to replace more than 200
buttons that control everything from the position of seats to aspects
of the navigation of the car itself to climate, communications and
entertainment systems.

The iDrive is powered in part by the stripped down version of
Microsoft's operating system for personal computers known as Windows
CE. Theoretically, Beemer drivers can adjust anything, move forward
and not take their eyes off the road. But that assumes that iDrive is
working.

A Worldwide Recall

Gary Conley, a retired executive in Silicon Valley, is now driving
his second BMW 745i. But it's not because the first one worked that
well.

His first car had so many problems that BMW bought it back last July.
This buy-back followed a worldwide recall in May of 15,000 7-series
cars, and a second recall in July of 286 vehicles by BMW Korea. The
Korea Times cited a software bug in the electronic management unit of
the vehicle's fuel pump that could make the engine stall. BMW
spokesman Gordon Keil says certain cars stalled if the fuel tank was
below 1/3, although this was not a problem that Conley ever reported.

Conley says his second car works better than his first one. For
example, when it creeps along the road, it does not automatically
brake without using the brake lights, as the first one was prone to
do. But it still has intermittent problems that BMW can't reproduce
or fix. The voice activation system sometimes fails, the transmission
slips, the phone may fail to power up, and the iDrive settings have
spontaneously disappeared and switched to metric units.

Indeed, Conley became so frustrated with BMW that he posted videos of
his errant car, along with his most recent repair records, on the
Web. (Click here for a collection of several of these links.) Out of
24 problems cited by Conley in December, his dealer was able to find
and fix only three of them, despite help from U.S. headquarters in
New Jersey.

"BMW tried to do too many things at once with this car, and they
underestimated the software problem," says Conley, who built test
equipment for semiconductors as the CEO of EPRO Corp., which sold to
Credence Corp. of Fremont, CA, in 1995. "Only two-thirds of hardware
has been unleashed by software. There are so many predecessors and
dependencies within software that it's like spaghetti-ware. It's not
that easy to get all these little components to plug and play."

Conley's situation may be unusual, but not unique. "About a month
after I took the car, my iDrive system totally failed," says Ron
Burke, a partner in the law firm of Brand Brand & Burke in New York
City. "This left me able to drive the car, but unable to operate the
radio, telephone or navigation system. BMW explained that it would
take a long time to fix it because only a few people were qualified
to address the problem. But they did fix it and it's worked ever
since."

BMW's Keil says the company has sold over 22,000 of the 745's-a 64%
increase over the previous 7-series-and has many happy customers. He
says that BMW will work with Conley until he, too, is happy, although
he questions whether some of Conley's problems could be solved if
Conley had better instruction on how to use the car. For example,
Keil says, the car's instrument clusters will reset themselves if the
battery is low. Keil also says BMW has done "extensive testing" of
the 745's.

Auto industry expert Dennis Virag, president of the Automotive
Consulting Group Inc., says the problem is not customer ignorance,
but industry carelessness. In the race to add glitzy amenities like
navigation, Virag says, auto manufacturers are contracting out the
development of immature and faulty software. "The auto industry is
highly regulated, and these are not mission-critical systems," he
says. "But companies like Microsoft can't do to the auto industry
what they did to the PC industry. You can't play Russian Roulette
every time you stick the key into the ignition."

<snip>

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