The industry should not seek speed over reliability, warns Paul Hunt, managing director of Phoebus Software

It’s an indicator of the extent to which smartphones have become part everyday life that the arrival of Gorilla Glass 2 has been lauded far beyond the trade press. Stronger glass – which could make cracked mobile screens a thing of the past – has made news from London to Auckland. But although the announcement should be cause for huge relief among butterfingered smartphone users, the makers themselves have acknowledged their innovation is unlikely to end this perennial problem.
The glass, which according to the manufacturer is 20% stronger than the first version, comes either in its original thickness – delivering a strength benefit – or thinner and ligher, but equally strong. The makers have had to admit the second of the two options is likely to prove more popular. Considering the competitiveness of the smartphone industry, with devices constantly doing battle to be lighter, thinner and easier to handle, this is no surprise. But from the consumer’s point of view, is this really a change for the better? Even though there’s a clear solution to what any iPhone user knows is an infuriating problem, it’s unlikely manufacturers will take the opportunity to make the improvement.
The inability of Gorilla Glass 2 to cure the curse of the cracked screen is a symptom of a wider problem in the technology industry. Smartphone manufacturers feel compelled to focus their marketing efforts on the capabilities of shiny new phones. After all, a ten gram weight saving on glass might be enough to allow an extra megapixel on the camera or shave startup time by a few hundredths of a second. What doesn’t get mentioned is how the phone looks 12 months down the line. The constant drive to beef up functionality and drive down weight has made the world’s smartphones inferior products for the huge number of people who suffer from the fact they can’t handle being dropped on a pavement.
When you increase the size, expense and importance of the technology you buy – at the scale, for instance, of mortgage lender implementing a new system – this obsession with beefy performance figures becomes potentially catastrophic. While spending half of a 24 month phone contract trying to decipher messages through broken glass is no more than an irritation, the sky’s the limit when assessing the financial, security and reputational costs of failure in a financial services system.
Of course, major industrial software systems and consumer electronics are different markets. But this is precisely the problem. The smartphone manufacturers aren’t likely to sacrifice speed, weight or size for better reliability. As anyone looking at Apple’s sales figures knows, that’s what sells. But the rather nastier hangover of this way of thinking is that it’s too frequently applied when implementing software that causes very serious problems when it fails.
There’s nothing wrong with looking for ways of making financial services software faster, more flexible and easier to use, but where failure is more disaster than inconvenience, the primary consideration must always be reliability. Mortgage lenders don’t just take their systems out for a spin at the weekend or get them out at dinner parties. They have to live with their systems every working day.
The seemingly innate compulsion technology consumers have to focus on speed, power and flexibility creates a big risk that qualities like longevity and stability are ignored. That’s not to say advancing speed, reducing size and improving flexibility aren’t vital parts of product development. But for tech companies who want to look after their customers, there no good reason why the undramatic essentials should any less inspiring than the spectacular cherries on the cake.