by Mark Minasi

As Mr. Minasi points out in his book, 90% of the bugs that consumers report to software vendors were already known by the vendors before the product was shipped; indeed, one of the best-known examples among software QA professionals (though not discussed in the book) is a well-known PC operating system that was reportedly released to the marketplace with 5,000 bugs that were known to the vendor at the time of release. "Why does the industry do this?" Minasi asks rhetorically. "Because they can. Because we let them." Software firms routinly spring conditions on you after you've paid for their product, but before you can install it on your computer: conditions they won't let you see before you pay for it; conditions that absolve them for any wrongs the product may do to your data — and absolve you of any rights you have to ownership or even use of the product you paid for.

So, what do we do about buggy software? Minasi devotes a chapter of his book to "Fighting Back," and an appendix to "Software Self-Defense." Good, common-sense advice is available here, and it may help prevent utter chaos for the computer novice who is blissfully unaware that his valuable business data can be destroyed by a computer bug that the vendor felt wasn't worth the cost and effort to remove from the final version that got shipped to the marketplace.