Reliability vs. Features
Todd Bishop talks about a poll Reliability vs. Features. Users were choosing "Software that works reliably" over "Software with innovative new features" with 95% over 5%.
Sorry to say, but that's bullshit.
What's reliability? Software isn't crashing? Software performs correct calculation (speaking in most generic terms)? Software performs calculation as user expects? Software has the feature set (both in breadth & depth) users expect? Software is "bug-free"? What's considered a "bug" - from a users point of view? From a vendors point of view?
Reliability isn't the absence of bugs. It's not about stability. It's about meeting the users expectations. And that's damned hard. Most of the time, it involves creating new features.
Hey, relax. When, before the advent of Windows, people were asked what they wanted from their next computer, 95% said, they wanted a faster, cheaper DOS system. Now, that's neither innovative nor more reliable than say, WIN XP or Mac OSX. People don't know what they want until they see it.
Which is not to say that software that does what I expect from it is not nice ;-).