Re:Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump
by hedora on Friday June 12, 2020 @11:02AM
(#23499928)
I blame the Software as a Service
model. Clearly, you should just downgrade to the old version of google docs (or whatever) that used 10% as many resources, and had a better UI.
Since you don’t get to control which version you use, teams don’t have to compete with last year’s version. Therefore their management doesn’t need to worry about extreme regressions in functionality, so they don’t take action to avoid them.
Since the service provider is the development team, you’re locked in, and won’t switch.
Usage metrics look good, management gets credit for shipping ${feature}, and gets their promotion. This happens a thousand times, and everyone wishes the irreparably broken ${megacorp} would just go out of business already.
This pattern doesn’t play out to the same extent with hardware, where people have to pay big lump sums to upgrade, and can hold on to older models / switch vendors instead.
Since you don’t get to control which version you use, teams don’t have to compete with last year’s version. Therefore their management doesn’t need to worry about extreme regressions in functionality, so they don’t take action to avoid them.
Since the service provider is the development team, you’re locked in, and won’t switch.
Usage metrics look good, management gets credit for shipping ${feature}, and gets their promotion. This happens a thousand times, and everyone wishes the irreparably broken ${megacorp} would just go out of business already.
This pattern doesn’t play out to the same extent with hardware, where people have to pay big lump sums to upgrade, and can hold on to older models / switch vendors instead.