WSJ: Glitches Bug Google's Android Software

I had a nice surprise this morning when I arrived at my desk. A yet to be identified reader turn contributor to my blog left a copy of the Wall Street Journal Technology Section on my desk folded to an article entitled Glitches Bug Google's Android Software. The salient few lines for me are:

"Functionality is not there, is poorly documented or just doesn't work. It's clearly not ready for prime time," said Mr. [Adam] MacBeth, who earlier this year helped found mobile software start-up [omitted on purpose]

Looks to me like Mr. MacBeth got himself some free publicity by giving them the quote that they wanted. That being said, I have yet to really dive into the development portion of my Android efforts - still in concept stages. So I don't know how buggy or not it is.

At any rate, Anyone who's been around the block once or twice in software knows that the bleeding edge stuff is always fraught with pitfalls. There is a reason version 2 exists. Dare I tie this in to Agile Software development thinking around deliver something and improve as you go? If you gold plate everything you bloat and you'll never make it out the door. note to self - tell them about the software side project you've been working on for 5+ years because you've been compulsive about doing it all the right way. It's a bit embarrassing.

Thankfully, the WSJ decided to be even handed and get another voice:

Rick Genter a professional software engineer who is writing an Android application in his free time, said that while Google's mobile software is buggy, it isn't necessarily any worse than any other software at such an early stage.

Thank you also to my reader/contributor for bringing this in. I have purposely not linked to WSJ because frankly, they don't seem to want to let me have access to their content so I won't be giving them my "network effect" love. And I'm not really sure that a story about a new platform being buggy is news.