The lack of accountability in the software industry
Did you ever stop to think about how the software industry is peculiarly free of any responsibility for their products? Install Windows and the EULA you agree to absolves Microsoft of any responsibility for what may happen to your computer. A security hole in Windows lets a hacker install malware on your PC? Not Microsoft’s problem. A bug in Internet Explorer keeps crashing the system? Not Microsoft’s fault. (Or so the EULA says.) No other category of products that is so widely sold is so deficient in consumer protection. Although I think that American tort law and ignorant jurors often result in travesties, the total lack of any legal responsibility for the quality of their products gives the software industry far too much leeway. In an interview at TechFlash, Brian Livingston, well-known writer about Windows, comments:
There is so much dirt in the computer industry that we’ll never find it all. I consider the computer industry to be one of the worst customer-service disappointments in the entire economy. When you think about products that don’t work, products that have bad security, it’s just endemic. It’s so disappointing to me. Even the car industry that has these terrible economic problems now, the automakers fought it, but you do have seatbelts, you do have airbags. You have, thanks to Consumer Reports, bumpers that don’t just crumble when you have a 5-mile-per-hour fender-bender in the parking lot. So cars are getting better. In the computer industry, we’re still in the Wild West. The bad guys ride into town on their horses and shoot everybody and they just ride away.
I’ve written software applications myself so I know all too well that complicated programs are going to have bugs. And making them fool-proof is probably not possible. I also know that clueless users can make a mess of things and then blame the software. But there must be some middle ground between total immunity for the software companies and total lack of responsibility on the users’ part. Somehow, the software industry has to take into account that they are selling a technical product to hundreds of millions of consumers who have no technical skills. The attitude of the industry that anything that goes wrong is not their responsibility is not tenable in such a mass-market environment.
What’s your opinion? Should the software industry be made more legally responsible for the quality and security of what they sell?
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