> You'll probably find a lot of the code is just copied from an earlier
> generation product (where HDs were much smaller), and the external drive
> thing was a last minute add-on.

It still bemuses me that they could go to all the trouble of writing a 
huge, complex USB driver, and yet not bother to add 3 lines of code to 
display a file count.

> Don't forget these type of products sell for 12 months or so until the
> next better one comes along

As the manufacturer, this is probably true. As the consumer, we've 
bought this thing and we're probably going to use it for at least 10 
years, if not longer. So the minor glitches that the manufacturer didn't 
bother to iron out in their rush to market are extremely annoying, and 
they're going to annoy us for the next 10 years.

> in a lot of cases it's much more profitable
> to sell your product NOW with a few bugs rather than wait some time to
> iron them out.

Reminds me of my PC motherboard. Splashed across the [very shiny] box is 
something about RAID support and dual-BIOS support. You know what? The 
product in the box doesn't actually possess either of these features. 
(!!) But about a year later, Gigabyte released a BIOS update that makes 
these features work as advertised.

(I especially love that you have to bypass the dual-BIOS in order to 
make the dual-BIOS work...)

> And in the end a company that makes amazing products but
> no profit will not last very long.

I would pay serious money to obtain hardware and software which isn't 
infuriatingly awkward to use. But unfortunately, that doesn't appear to 
be an option. Nobody makes it.

What, fundamentally, can we do about this? How can we make it 
unprofitable to produce poor quality products?

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