On Feb 07, 1996 at 07:17, Bill Grimsley of 3:640/305.9 wrote:

 BG> Furthermore, only Paul Edwards thinks it's a bug, whilst the other 5
 BG> million Courier owners are obviously too thick to realise it...

Y'know, there's this package - "SoftRAM" or something that's
supposed to double your memory capacity under Windows (both 3.x and '95),
in the same way you can get software disk doublers.

Anyway, the company producing this product has sold literally thousands
(probably millions, I can't recall - I can get the whole saga text for you
if you want, but it's fairly long/large), and hardly anyone (nobody?) has
complained about it - they're all seemingly happy.

A number of people/organisations have tested this "SoftRAM"
product, and it doesn't even *attempt* to compress your memory;  IOW, it's
a dud.  But people are happy to use it.

There's also the story of the psych team in the U.S. who released a
gee-whiz app that did *nothing* (great UI, though) really, and after
selling so many copies as part of an experiment into human behaviour and
purchasing patterns, they sent out letters to everyone who bought the
product, explaining the situation and offering them all their money back. 
Most people refused, and wanted to keep the product.  That did nothing.

I'm not saying USR modems are duds, just that, "A million other users
can't be wrong!" is a dud justification/explanation.  Remember, most
users of any computing product wouldn't have a clue what they were using
anyway.  It's like my boss - recently purchased a Pentium 90MHz with
CD-ROM, 16Mb (or was it 32Mb?) RAM, 1.6Gb disk, 17" monitor, etc. etc.
.. all for printing out email and reading documents in Microsoft Word; 
doesn't *create* documents in Word, doesn't *create* email messages
(secretaries for that) and doesn't use Excel or anything strenuous
(calculations done with a hand-held, pen and paper).

Cheers..

    - dave
    d.begley{at}ieee.org

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