Watching Old Software Decay - Time Zone Changes

Mar 01 2007

By Kurt Seifried (kurt@seifried.org)

People often argue that software doesn’t decay, or to quote an Op-Ed piece from the New York Times:

The software industry’s sluggishness is not just a reflection of the vagaries of the economic cycle. It is a manifestation of a fundamental, if often overlooked, characteristic of the industry’s product: software never decays. Machinery breaks down, parts wear out, supplies get depleted. But software code remains unchanged by time or use. In stark contrast to other industrial products, software has no natural repurchase cycle.

But this simply isn’t true (never has been, never was). Software decays, much like a radioactive element, some decay rapidly, and some decay very slowly. For example accounting software that implements tax rules may become obsolete within a year due to changes in the tax code. Customer service management software can decay rapidly due to changes in the way customers are handled, the products offered, and so on. Conversely some software packages decay very slowly, avionics software for example often lasts for decades, and some operating systems have also withstood the test of time.

However it is very rare that a single event will cause software and operating systems to suddenly jump forward in their decay rate, however this can and does happen.

Ironically this forward jump in software decay rates has occurred due to the US government passing the “Energy Policy Act of 2005″ which includes an amendment to the “Uniform Time Act” that results in daylight savings being extended by 4 weeks. Fortunately most operating systems were built with the ability to change which timezone a system resides within, unfortunately the definitions of these timezones is not so easily modified.

This issue is perfectly illustrated by a friend of mine who runs a small consulting business, they have Macintosh desktops and use scheduling software to book appointments. My friend mentioned to me that all the standing appointments for the month of March had gone off by an hour, and that the software wouldn’t let her change them. I almost immediately figured out this issue was related to the time zone changes, it appears that Mac OS X has gotten updated properly with the new timezones, however the software they are using to schedule things is not so up to date.

Now we have two solutions that come to mind:

1) Change the timezone manually at the beginning and end of the new spring and fall time zone changes, meaning 4 manual changes per year per system.

2) Update the software to a newer version which will hopefully understand that for those of us living in Canada the time zones behave differently than in America.

Except that option #1 won’t actually work (ignoring manually fiddling the clocks constantly) because standing appointments will still be an hour off for either the extra 4 weeks of Daylight savings, or for the other 48 weeks of the year when you are within the new 4 weeks of Daylight savings. Trying to manually remember that all your appointments are off by one hour, either for a specific 4 weeks or 48 weeks of the year depending what day it is probably is not a realistic option for most people.

So we can only hope that a newer version of the software is available at a reasonable price. As for airline scheduling, stock market quoting and trade execution and other types of legacy software that heavily relies upon knowing what time it is and scheduling events I can only say that I’m glad that it’s not my problem.

Energy Policy Act

Uniform Time Act

Microsoft Is Dead. Long Live Microsoft.

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