Why do companies produce the products they do?

I don’t mean why does a company like Western Digital produce disk drives, but why do they produce a disk drive that doesn’t meet customers’ expectations?

Some time ago, I purchased a WD 1TB "My Book Essentials" disk drive. The packaging said it worked under Windows and OS X and it was reasonably priced. What I really wanted to do was plug it into the PVR we use with out TV. Not surprisingly, Bell-Aliant, our service provider, supplies a version with firmware that doesn't support extending the measly disk capacity of the PVR. But that is another story. After a lot of other mucking around and nearly bricking my Mac in an attempt to turn it into a Linux machine, I finally restored Mac OS X and my data.

As my previous posts have explained, I am trying OS X Lion (10.7.2) again. This second attempt at living with another cat in the house seemed to have been going really well. No crashes. Then suddenly, lots of them…

It struck me that they were happening when I was trying to use the 1TB WD drive — I wanted to use it as a Time Machine drive. I have a really nice La Cie 500GB drive that I wanted to use as an external, bootable drive to run Linux on my Mac, so I needed an alternate backup drive.

I unplugged the WD drive and was able to reboot my Mac. A brief search of the Internet swamped me with posts about these WD "My Book" drives. WD must have suffered from the adverse publicity because I also found they now have a firmware update that removes the offensive behaviour that most people were complaining about (it used up about 1GB for a "virtual CD" that could not be removed, even by repartitioning the drive, because there was a hidden partition controlled by the firmware). The virtual CD was not my problem, but crashes were. A further search unearthed another firmware update that looked like it would solve some drive problems, so I downloaded that. One of the steps the updater does before attempting to install the firmware update, is scan for the target drive and then supposedly ask for confirmation. I say “supposedly” because my Mac crashed while it was searching.

Of course, I'm sure WD is anxious to keep their customers happy as the following posts on an Apple-hosted forum says:

“I have 4 external hard drives. 1 Time Capsule I use with Time Machine and 3 WD drives: a My Book World Edition, a My Passport, and a My Passport Essential SE. Since upgrading to Lion, the only one that works is Time Capsule. WD hasn't released any firmware updates for the others yet.”

“Having spoken to WD, they were not even particularly sympathetic and can’t advise when a soft or firm ware update is likely to be available.”

I don’t think I’ll be purchasing another WD drive any time soon.