Software Failure Quotes

W2K will be a bigger disaster than Y2K.

There are programs that don't work.

A crash is when your competitor's program dies. When your program dies, it is an 'idiosyncrasy'.

The combination of threads, remote-procedure-call interfaces, and heavyweight object-oriented design is especially dangerous... if you are ever invited onto a project that is supposed to feature all three, fleeing in terror might well be an appropriate reaction.

Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad.

With software products, it is usual to find that the software has major 'bugs' and does not work reliably for some users... The lay public, familiar with only a few incidents of software failure, may regard them as exceptions caused by exceptionally inept programmers. Those of us who are software professionals know better; the most competent programmers in the world cannot avoid such problems.

Twenty-five years ago, the notion was you could create a general problem-solver software that could solve problems in many different domains. That just turned out to be totally wrong.

Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.

Well, user feedback was excellent. Even when the software didn't work at all, there were few people who were avid users, and there were people who were just sending excellent feedback and excellent ideas.

Of all the things you can spend a lot of money on, the only things you expect to fail frequently are software and medicine.

The reality of most software development is that the consequences of failure are simply nonexistent.

When I write software, I know that it will fail, either due to my own mistake, or due to some other cause.

Much to the surprise of the builders of the first digital computers, programs written for them usually did not work.

Wired gave 'Duke Nukem Forever' the first Vaporware Award, and then the next year it won No. 1 vaporware again, and then again and again until Wired decided, you know what? 'Duke Nukem' is just going to get the lifetime achievement award for vaporware.

In software, the chain isn't as strong as its weakest link; it's as weak as all the weak links multiplied together.