[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by ali

I can't imagine that to happen. Think developer guy goes to marketing guy and management guy, and he says "That's it, we're done". Now there's two options: First, publish it, giving users a reason to sue or get refunds; where several already said they'll loose their patience in reaction to that announcement. Option 2: Say nothing, stay in the state of no liability because users signed they can live with unfinished software.

At some point, they have to say "we are production ready". It can't stay in test forever.

Now that doesn't mean that they will meet all their original promises then. Perhaps they were over-optimistic. But regardless, officially the iLiad it still in test. To judge it until it's officially production is unfair and inaccurate.

Originally Posted by ali

Woo. Not at all. The benefit of modular software design is that you can get lots of features with small development effort, in short time. It speeds up everything because you can use stable, tested, general-purpose code without having to worry for details.

It also means that you can make significant changes to how the system works without impacting everything that it written on top of it.

Yes, it's suboptimal code. That's the trade off. But with very few exceptions (like systems that require 100Hz responses to real-time events), that trade off is worth it for flexibility.

Originally Posted by ali

You get stuck in the situation where improvement is only possible by refactoring all of the general-purpose modules for the new constraint.

Actually, that's an attribute of special-purpose systems, not modular ones.

So, we have a choice: we can have a system that is optimized for the hardware, making the device fast and easy on the power - with the downside that any problems will probably require a large change to the system. Also, supporting new hardware is much more difficult.

Or we can have a system that is less optimized and modular, making the device a little slower and a little more power hungry - with the upside that problems are quickly and easily corrected and support for new hardware much easier.

I've already dealt with such a choice and that's why I haven't used a Microsoft product at home since 2001.