Hardware Horrors that Firmware Upgrades Would've Fixed? 38
Anonymous Coward writes "I just started working for a startup that
is developing a new product, which is going to have software bundled
with hardware. Our company outsourced the hardware and firmware
development. I reviewed the hardware product requirements and I
noticed that the hardware will not support firmware upgrades from the
PC. I am concerned that once we ship the product, bugs or
interoperability issues will appear in the field and we won't have
anyway to fix the problem short of a product recall. I have some of
the management team convinced we need to change this requirement but
not the person who has the authority to make the change. I'm looking
for examples of past companies that got bit by a similar mistake and
any other items that will help me convince the decision maker."
Nobody is perfect, so why do we assume that we can design hardware
that is? If it's one thing that our current experiences with software
have shown it's that sometimes, an applications may take more than one
version before it is perfect. Before, our ability to change hardware
coding made getting perfect products out the door important, because
recalls were expensive. Today, we have smarter hardware, which can be
relatively simple to update. The cost of recalls, however,
have not changed. So for what reason would a hardware company balk
at making the need for a recall a thing of the past?
iPod (Score:3, Informative)
Direct TV (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Direct TV (Score:2, Informative)
CD-ROM drives (Score:3, Informative)
Not so.
Many of the 12x and 16x units wouldn't read CDRs, which would have made them near worthless in today's world. For most of them, the fix was as simple as slowing the speed and trying another pass at reading before giving up.
For many brands, a flash upgrade was all it took to fix these and give them value again. The upgrade was made available to consumers who suddenly had brand loyalty for what's normally a pretty ambigously branded piece of hardware.
For many other brands, the units became bargain bin fodder and left a lot of consumers pissed off at what they thought was broken hardware.
Every ISP using Cisco CPE's (Score:3, Informative)
Back around August 2001, that famous MSTD [everything2.com], the CodeRed worm was swarming across the Internet. One side effect of it's probing behavior was to trigger a bug in certain models of Cisco DSL modems. The result was a crashed modem.
The user could power cycle the modem, but it would die again shortly when their neighbor's infected system probed them. This was a catastrophe for the ISP's involved.
This effected many people, more than a million I believe.
Cisco put out a corrective CD-ROM that reflashed the CPE with fixed firmware. If this had not been possible, Cisco would probably have ended up paying to replace all those modems. Running off some CD-ROMs was a lot cheaper.
Linksys Cable/Dsl router (Score:2, Informative)
Read the readme.txt for a long history of bugs that have been fixed through firmware upgrades - originally I had problems with it, and it was a firmware upgrade that fixed it - the saving grace for this product.
Having firmware upgrades for a product is a very prudent thing to do. Anybody that doesn't think so is arrogant.
Upgradeable firmware extended Viking life (Score:4, Informative)
The 1975 Viking Mars lander was expected to last only a few months on the Mars surface; battery life was the limiting factor. The battery lasted longer than expected, but eventually the Sun would come between Earth and Mars. With the lander fully powered the battery would be dead by the time Earth came back into view.
NASA (or maybe it was JPL) thought of reprogramming the Viking controller to power down, wait a few months, then power back up. (The power-up had to be automatic; in power-down mode there was no communication with Earth.)
Viking had reprogrammable firmware, but only for pre-flight programming. Reprogramming during the mission hadn't been anticipated, so the diagnostic bus through which the ROM was reprogrammed was removable. There was no record of whether the Viking which NASA had sent to Mars had that bus or not! Nor was there a way to detect bus presence.
On the chance that the bus was installed, new code was tested on an Earth-bound copy of the Viking which had the bus, then uploaded. The Mars lander did have the bus, the code worked, and NASA got several additional months of operation from Viking.