Quality and responsibility

Is the quality of end-user electronic products deteriorating? It is, according to Kamran Firooz, VP and general manager of Agilent Technologies' manufacturing test division. "The quality and reliability of electronics has not improved over the past few years and in some respects has suffered a setback," he said in an October 23 phone interview. His evidence thus far is anecdotal—the number of broken cell phones and VCRs in your garage, for example.

It's not just the quality of the hardware that may be suffering but also the quality of the system integration necessary to get products to work together. Alex d'Arbeloff, chairman of the board of the MIT Corp., recounted in his October 8 keynote address to the International Test Conference the difficulty he experienced getting DSL service installed in his home. After six weeks of hassles involving his system integrator, DSL service-provider Verizon's representatives, and MIT's Eudora e-mail experts, d'Arbeloff was finally able to send e-mails longer than two lines.

Of course, Firooz and d'Arbeloff have incentive to put a negative spin on quality issues: Firooz undoubtedly hopes to sell more test equipment to address perceived quality shortcomings, and d'Arbeloff may hope to persuade you to buy a fully integrated test system from Teradyne, the company he founded. (The peril of third-party ATE integration was a major theme of his speech.) Yet, their anecdotal evidence rings true, and you no doubt can contribute anecdotes of your own: cell phone voice quality that falls far short of what advertisements promise, fragile hard drives that demand continual and tedious backup of critical data, and DVD players that are intolerably persnickety about which DVDs they'll reliably play.

Consumer confidence, or lack of it, is a key spec that describes the economy; cited in financial pages, it indicates how confident consumers are in their own economic condition. But consumers also need confidence in the products they propose to purchase. No matter how flush they may feel, they won't buy products that they expect will quickly fail or will never work properly in the first place. As they are not feeling flush today, it's increasingly unlikely that they'll buy electronic products about whose quality and usability they harbor the least doubt.

Poor design, shoddy production, and insufficient test can all degrade product quality. So, too, can insufficient cooperation among the vendors and integrators of multivendor systems.

What's your take on the state of electronic product quality? Is it deteriorating? If so, who's responsible and what can be done? Send me your comments at the e-mail address below.

Contact Rick Nelson at rnelson@tmworld.com