When Looking Bad Makes You Good
Aren’t you afraid you’re going to make everybody look bad?
I often get asked this question when I am demonstrating the product, discussing test results, or explaining how my product works to the folks who are testing network devices. Why is it that everyone is afraid of looking bad? It seems like the whole network industry has been immersed in this fear for so long that they’re willing to do anything to look good.
Test gear companies are aware of this fear, so they’ve built their products to favor specific network equipment vendors. At the end of the day, test gear companies will do anything to ensure that their customers’ products don’t look bad – even if it means tweaking their test gear to work better with certain network equipment. My problem with this is: how will network equipment manufacturers ever know if their stuff really works if they’re not breaking their equipment?
One of the reasons why the companies I’ve been with have all been successful is because we focused on breaking our equipment. I wanted to find test gear that showed me the problems with our products; I wasn’t particularly looking for test gear that would help improve the specs on our data sheets. Obviously, that’ s not a bad thing, but it’s not the most important thing. The most important thing for us was finding the issues with our products before they were released into the field. After all, the field is the worse place to find an issue, the costs are a lot higher and the debugging time is infinitely longer.
So, my answer to the question, “Aren’t you afraid you’re going to make everyone look bad?” is no. I’m afraid of what will happen if someone installs network equipment that wasn’t properly tested. I’m afraid something terrible will happen, like a CEO not being able to access their e-mail or giant wombats overtaking the world.
What do you use your test gear for?
