But when they were lost, they had already been well worth it, since they did have such a big effect on naval operations.


Not really a matching comparison. In some cases, a product can be well worth it on its own, even if the rest of a chain can't match that single link. And sometimes, a short-term gain can be so big that it doesn't matter if the product can't keep up 12 months later. Possibly because the product was delivered at a good moment in time, or having a critical killer feature. You could say that the Canon 300D digital SLR camera wasn't so very good compared by todays cameras. But it was a camera that was way better than the competitors at a price no competitor could match. So it did kick-start the digital revolution by getting a large number of photographers to try the digital realm.

The start of the war ment that Germany could not produce follow-up ships capable of working with Bismarck or Tirpitz, so they could not gain 100% from Bismarck. But they still gained tremendously. Bismarck and Tirpitz had a combined weight of about 10% of the current Royal Navy. So much power concentrated into two ships made it quite hard to ignore them, and very, very dangerous to try to do anything about them.


No. They may spend 10,000 man-hours on license fights, creating the best sales presentation to make their investors happy, and making product changes that will make your currently working installation incompatible and in need of both a sw and hw update. No, I can't really see that they spend any significant time on security. The copy-protection schemes in Windows, Office etc may be very irritating and costly to the end users, but they do not represent any bigger investments from Microsoft.

The only companies that does invest heavily in security is the movie, game and music industry, with their DRM ploys. But even there, there are probably quite fiew engineering hours involved. Most is spent on lawyers, "supporting" politicians etc.

The reason why costs are cut from test departments is basically time-to-market, and that the product lifespans are so short that they are busy implementing the next generation product before the previous generation has been released, and are working with the plans for even newer generations. As soon as one or two companies have started to gain market shares by being first bringing more unusable features to the market, the competitors don't really have a choice. The problem isn't the manufacturers, but us stupid customers. As long as the majority of customers selects cheap or "cool" instead of making qualified decisions, the companies just have to send out cheap and/or "cool" products, even if they know that many of the features are truly ridiculous.

Who buys "german quality"? Some do, and don't care about the price. The majority don't, which means that the majority of the manufacturers have to design and build based in completely different criteria. That also means that the majority of all developers will just have to accept the requirements the management puts forward. If the customer explicitly does not want extra quality, then the company can't spend extra on unwanted QA work.

In the end, there is a small niche for quality. But the majority of all products will fall into the quantity bin. Bismarck was in the quality niche where you only needed a few, but each one worth just about anything. Same thing today. You may need a huge number of armoured vehicles for it to matter. But one single aircraft carrier can dominate a huge area.

No need to complain about stupid customers or stupid management. If the product happens to be in the quantity niche, customer and management don't have much of a choice but to request a cheap and fast delivery. A competitor may have a high-end solution, but just about survive from the few customers who are ready to pay for the extra quality.