10 Aug
2006
10 Aug
'06
8:57 p.m.
Not sure I'd agree on the reliability...I've
spilled my fair share of
coke into keyboards, and contact-closure keyswitches just don't cut it
for me unless they're sealed.
You can make switches that are cheap and nasty, and you can make
switches that will last 100 years - and everything in between. If you
want a fair comparison, match the HP keyboard against a quality
"mechanical switch" keyboard, not a Chinese piece of crap. Lets face
it, HP stuff of that era was pretty much the pinnacle of engineering.
But aside from that, I firmly believe there should
be more to
designing than just doing the minimum required to get by. There is a
certain amount of art involved in what we do.
Yes, there is (I have trouble explaining this to some artist friends).
Or, at least, there *was*.
It is a blurred line, that of marketting, economics, and engineering.
Certainly there are still plenty of products that have much more than
the minimum to get buy - high end sports cars are a good non-computer
example. These things, however, are a much smaller share of the global
market these days than they were in the past. With the end of the Cold
War and the increase in Asian production, it is getting extremely
difficult to justify going over the minimum in a design - for the most
part that is just wasting money. Shareholders do not like that.
--
Will