A classy week for Google’s QA department, if it has one. Two cracking problems this week. We can only assume it does, but borrowing from the world of mobile they are overridden by marketing and others to launch anyway.

The one I came across was an awful Catch-22 on the Outlook/Google calender sync application. My Vista machine asked it I wanted to run a file called Gooupd.tmp (or something like that, it started Goo and end in .tmp). Instant reaction was that this was some kind of inept virus/trojan trying to install itself. Checking on the path to the file it was in the Goosync directory. So I let it run. It wanted me to exit Outlook to run the update, fair enough, but Outlook 2007 on Vista at least runs as a background process all the time. The only way to exit is it logout and in again as simply killing it with task manager leaves the data file in a mess. But of course, logging out kills the update. And there’s no other other way of making it happen. Catch-22.

The other problem is now called the root console bug. When I first  heard that text keyed on the G1 keypad went straight into a root console I thought it was a very fresh urban legend.  However it’s not - there’s an official release to fix it. While not many people are going to SMS rm -rf / to their mates, it’s still an amazingly sloppy piece of releasing.

Part of our release process is always remove all debugging. Even stuff that you “know” won’t ever be visible, take it out. Clearly the Android team did not apply this simple rule. Perhaps they had been on a death march and were asleep on their feet. Perhaps marketing (and T-Mobile) decreed that it had to go no matter how broken.

Sigh. Mobile rules apply again.

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