A free email newsletter offering Windows news, articles, tips and reviews. Investing Internet Technology Windows Internet Tech. In a sense, this results from the tradition of many software companies of ignoring non-critical bugs.
Software engineering is a new discipline.
In fact, until recently it wasn't widely recognized that software quality might be an important issue. Computer hardware is designed in accordance with a long tradition of professional engineering, dating back at least to the 1800s and earlier. Testing, verification and quality assurance standards in software, to the extent that they are actually used, are protozoan compared to the methods used by hardware engineers. That's why, despite the great publicity of bugs such as the Pentium's division flaw, the bugs are overwhelmingly in the software, not the hardware. The fact that bugs make a program frustrating and difficult to use hasn't been a major issue until now.