Hardware Horrors that Firmware Upgrades Would've Fixed?

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?

BIOS .. Palm..

[josepha48]

BIOS used to not be all upgradable. It used to be that you would have to replace the chip. Then it dawned on someone to make them software upgradable for bugs and features fixes. Like LBA enhancements.

Palm pilots (maybe not all, but many and mine) are upgradable. They do this cause they know that software needs to be upgradable. Just about ALL software has bugs.

If your product goes out and has bugs in it and it causes people loss of data, or worse, you will build yourself a reputation. Sort of like the release of Windows 95 did for Microsoft. No matter how they try they now have a reputation for buggy crashing software. Even if your product is the best on the market if it gets a reputation of bugginess, it will be harder to over come if people have to BUY an upgrade to fix it or BUY a whole new device instead of download bug fixes that makes it worse. While many people will do it they do it till something better comes a long.

Features are nice, but FIXES are essential to people staying with a product. I stopped useing Microsoft products whenever possible cause I'd rather use a *nix flavor that is less likely to crash on me while typing. This was after my experiences with Win 3.1/95/98 and NT 4.0. I am not impressed enought and do not trust Win2k, Me, or XP. They just don't have the reputation that Sun, BSD, UNIX and Linux have built. I never used a Windows BOX that could stay up for 275 days, but I have seen and used many Sun, BSD, and Linux boxes that were. In fact many of the IT staff people that I have worked with would not support a windows box if you did not reboot it atleast once a day. Also most people I knew or know who do not reboot about once a day end up rebooting when the system crashes.

So ask your boss, or the person who makes that decision, "Do you want to be a company that works with the consumer to fix the problem and help make their experience with the product better, or do you want to be one that gets a reputation for bad buggy software?"

My Pentium-133

[PD]

I once had a Pentium 133 that worked properly in all ways except one: When I installed an IDE CD-ROM, the machine could not see the drive. After much digging, I found that the problem was in the AMI BIOS on the motherboard. I bought a new BIOS from Mr. BIOS, and that fixed the problem completely. If that board had a flashable BIOS, the problem could have been solved without changing an IC.