Apple, Google, and Avid: The Perils of Complexity and Arrogance

September 27, 2019

Apple wants to make Mac users safe. The technology Apple uses requires passwords. Behind the scenes, Apple’s zeros and ones are beavering away to make Mac use a breeze. The trick? Just stick with Apple.

Google wants to point fingers at Apple iPhone and get Chrome on every Mac computer. Ads, surveillance, and real estate are probably motives. The Googlers are darned confident that their code is just peaches. Imagine the pain and shame of posting an admission of sorts that Google nukes some Macs. See this post. (Bonus time?)

Then there is Avid. To prevent the ethical lads and lasses in Hollywood and other video hot spots from pirating software, dongles are the answer. That’s Avid’s policy. No dongle, no go.

The problem is that none of these confident (maybe arrogant?)outfits think about the unknown dependencies within users’ computers. There are too many users. There are too many combinations of software and dongles.

The solution is to assume that everything will work. But when it doesn’t, the arrogant outfits have to explain that:

Their code may not be perfect
The security procedures may cause problems
The dongle things add complexity.

Will these types of issues become more frequent? Will smart software avoid these problems? Will pigs fly?

Stephen E Arnold, September 27, 2019

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Google, News, Technology

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.