Quality of products go down as quantity goes up

The race to get your product out of the door faster to be the first with a product out to get the share of the market is making for very sloppy products.  I've been noticing that big companies like Microsoft, Apple, google, release products way too early without having fixed most of the problems.

One of hte biggest problems I've been noticing of late, is poor support for larger fonts. And here's the amusing part, the western world is full of baby boomers, who now all suffer from from presbyopia.


Last night blogger forced their new interface on me and the size of fonts I was using in firefox made me run into a plethora of bugs that made blogging a real PITA.  Today as I squint to write this in a smaller font size, I'm not running into 1001 bugs.

I have to admit though, being a QA specialist for the past 20 years, no one ever tests anything other then in small fonts in Windows [with the exception of me that is].  It's obvious when you use large fonts with some apps. Never mind the new "extra large fonts" in windows 7. 

I remember years ago, we wanted to develop a product with high DPI, where we were going to use an extra large font. I believe it was 150 DPI [small is 96 DPI and large is 120 DPI] or maybe even larger, and I did some research for them.   I remember finding that most applications did not function well in such large font sizes, and that developing a product to support such font sizes was just going to be nightmarish because we would get blamed for the fact 3rd party software was not functioning well with fonts that large.

And I bet most people who do QA aren't in the age group who need to use larger fonts so they never think about it.

And for the record I'm not anymore impressed with Windows 8 now then I was back in June. I also have no desire to own any apple products!