Why do HW companies make SW that sucks

I myself am employed in a company that's supposed to be in the HW design field. Why I say "supposed to be", is another subject.
I work as a programmer. Judging by the way things are done around here, I can understand why many companies make HW development tools that simply suck, and are sources of great frustration and headaches to the end-user.
They simply don't seem to understand what efficiency is.
Let me take an example: one of the thing that I could never understand is why many companies spend valuable time and effort on developing editors that suck, when there are plenty of beter (or should I say, way better?) generic editors available that could be used. This is not only a waste of effort and time, but it never is efficient, because in the end, the product always sucks. Those peope at Micro$oft don't get paid for nothing, if you think a little about it.
I could take thousands of examples from my everyday job, but I'd rather not, you can understand why.

yes ... the stupidity is not measured !!

exemple : why the headlights of cars are they different ?

why ... ???

6 * F

This is more universal than just computers. What happens is that a company has a product line in a certain technology or market area. People who are good at this area get promoted. These people are poor judges of abilities in other areas and so hire poor performers who boast a lot for the other areas. Or they "save" money by offering low salaries in these other areas and get low performers for them.

flatulent said:

This is more universal than just computers. What happens is that a company has a product line in a certain technology or market area. People who are good at this area get promoted. These people are poor judges of abilities in other areas and so hire poor performers who boast a lot for the other areas. Or they "save" money by offering low salaries in these other areas and get low performers for them.

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Can you read people's minds? This is EXACTLY what happens here. They hire unexperienced programmers, and "train" them in the worst possible way, paying the lowest possible salaries. And why is that? Because NO experienced programmer would accept the salaries they offer. A serious SW company pays 4, 5 and maybe more times the salary I get here for what I do.
And for that you get a product that has the quality of making a user wanna blow up the computer, not to mention programmers getting frustrated with they way there are forced to work.

Hi,

Another aspect of the problem is the time to market. People of the marketing promise a product for a few month and the delay is to short for the developpers. But you need to be present on the field, because your competitors are behind you, waiting for the opportunity to win the market.
What will you do in this case. Would you wait to have a well finished product without any bug, or will you put it on the market with a new release every month or every week ?

Have a look at microsoft site. There are security updates 2 or 3 times a month. They have made the choice to be on the field, whatever the risk.

I agree whith you, but what can we do in front of a worldwide game ?

Time, to market... It is all about money in the end. About people that give unrealistic time to market estimations to the clients, and force programmers to find "unorthodox" way to cope with them.
But, is it always the case? In my case, they use more than obsolete proggraming languages (again, I'd rather not exemplify), and the productivity is ridiculous, compared to modern languages.
Give the same project we are working on to a SW company that has no idea what HW is. Teach them only what they need to know about HW - and believe me, there is very little to know from a programmer's point of view - and if they use modern productive languages/tools, they'd finish it in no time, while we'd find ourselves stuck in some stupid bug.
Or, is the problem more general than this? Should we look for more generic reasons? I don't know.