With all this talk of retiring the NASA space shuttle fleet and Canadian astronauts being propelled into space using this 1960’s to 1980’s technology I thought I’d write about the software that makes the space jalopy work. The coding when compared to commercial software is far superior, being that when your OS encounters a bug at home or you office, chances are good that you’re not flying thousands of Km/h high above the continents with millions of pounds of extremely explosive fuel strapped to you. Therefore, the software used by NASA for these shuttles is as close to perfect as we’ve been able to get…on this planet. But what about these guys?

Software inevitably has errors. Thousands upon thousands, millions upon millions of lines of source code, at times co-authored by several different people is just not likely at this point to be perfect; especially with deadlines and competitive pressure from other firms. And where there may not be bugs there may be logic errors, that slip through the debugging process even if your syntax is correct. See this NY Times article on the development process for Microsoft Windows Vista and you start to get the picture of how screwed up software platforms can become in a clunky and inefficient design environment. To err is human, but these particular kinds of software errors cost the US economy alone up to 60 billion dollars every year

Open-source software has been hailed by some as offering a new programming method that actually decreases the amount of bugs because of the multiple scrutinizing eyes combing over the code as it matures. Google may have had this philosophy in mind when they pre-released Google Wave to scores of developers earlier this year, hoping to avoid MS Windows-like problems. See previous post. But to get back to the soon to be retired space shuttle fleet. In the newest Microsoft operating systems there are tens of millions (about 40 to 50) of lines of code and scores of bugs, perhaps thousands. The software coding for the shuttles has about 420,000 lines, smaller yes, but in the past three versions have only had ONE bug apparently. And the past 11 versions collectively have had only 17 errors total.  So for 4.5 million lines of code we have 17 bugs total. As an Astronaut I like those odds. That means I only have a 1 in 265 thousand chance of being blown to pieces on the job. Still probably a lot lower odds than your average safe desk job.

If you haven’t heard by now Google released a developer preview of their social networking tool and open source web playground Google Wave.  Currently there are scores of developers collaborating on new apps and features before the official launch of the product. It’s a very user friendly HTML 5 app that’s been designed with convenience and efficiency in mind, and the demonstration that was given earlier this year in San Francisco was very well received.

The collaborative design potential of this product as well as well as the management potential of Google Chrome and other oncomming cloud-based systems in my opinion truly reaffirm googles innovative and dominant role online today, and as the other towering giant beside Microsoft. I’ve always liked the way Google approaches their product development. Some may say it’s reckless and wastes a lot of time and money but Google likes to come up with all kinds of platforms or apps and then brainstorm uses for the technology afterwards or simply let them loose to sink or swim, sometimes pulling the plug halfway through the software development phase because they realize it’s just not economically feasible. Google is also famous for encouraging their engineers to work on pet projects outside of work. And with the new focus on open source products, nimble cost effective cloud-based management IT and high powered browsers like Chrome it looks like google is positioning itself to lead at least big business out of this recession, or to becoming a game changer once our global economy starts revving up once again. A simple money making approach; What will save companies time and money, the two most valuable things they have when trying to benefit from their human capital? Google appears to have this in mind when dropping several developments in favor of Wave, Chrome and their other Enterprise-class analytics tools. So is this a repositioning, right sizing, or just being quick on their feet? Some would even argue that it’s just getting back to basics and what you do best in these turbulent economic times.