A road named NoNameUno

Needless to say that I'm a big fan of osr news group from osronline.com. Despites it highs and lows of signal to noise ratios, it is one damn gathering of exceptional people of windows kernel mode programming. Yes, admittedly it is a very very narrow area of software/hardware, but purely from sampling point of view, this is good enough to see how often we struggle to make sense of dollars and cents ...

One of the current discussion is as a by product of x86 protection rings, is now Offshoring, cost of making a working drivers, reliablity or otherwise crapy software, etc., etc., ...

Don't get me wrong, I respect most of the views there, and you can peep thru this by registering to that site. But couple things bothers me big time. Here are some of them -

First, for uninitiated, while cost of a product is easily determined, the price of a product is not. This is one fundamental paradigm of "Theory of Economics". Obviously then what should be the cost of a production quality  driver under windows?. Frankly, I don't know. So there has to be some estimation of it. And this would depend on two things: (a)The type of the driver and its functionality, and (b)its quality. Whille (a) could be determined with a very wide variation, (b) is very difficult to measure to say it politely.

Given the fact that quality depends on the experiances of the team who designs/develop the product, cost can vary vastly since it is the price one is willing to pay as price to the team. Note that ones' cost is the price for other. A simple example is that lot of us migrated to another country to increase our price for services. Similarly lot of others migrated to less developed country to reduce the price and increased their chance of making their product and service more affordable to buyers at a lesser cost. In software, it is the labor to produce software. In measureable terms it is the wages either per hour or per month or per year.

So only thing remains to prove that qualility of the software producing by expensive people ( experts who charges lot more :) are indeed better in quality. Since the industry as a whole is not quite ready to have formal or semi formal approaches to tackle the quality problem, only thing remains to see is the failure rates of the software developed by people with lower wages. It is more like electing a government, and see they fail or pass.

But one thing to remember, when it comes to kernel mode software component, having a faulty product makes thing very nasty. So this becomes even more difficult for decision makers to go offshoring or stay with local experts. Perhaps it is best to have branch offices throughout the places where such experts are readily available. But then lot of companies love to have temp/contract/consultancy wings engaged in their product developments for lot of reasons. First those people are first to go when some slowdown comes. Second that those costs are business expenses, so from accounting perspective it is enticing.

That was my analysis, if you still wondering what I should say about all this, the punch line is -

" I don't necessarily encourage my kids to think about persuing high tech career ..."