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The reason is simple: short term thinking driven by short term investors

• ams6110 9y ago
  Or maybe it's what is repeated here so often: don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Perhaps it really is cheaper to have a few outages than it is to built the sort of systems that never go down. Every "nine" you add gets more and more expensive. Or perhaps the systems are so complex that it's just impossible for them to be fully reliable, and this is just one of the costs of having the ability to fly anywhere in the world, cheaply and at the drop of a hat, and to have it work 99% of the time.
  • mancerayder 9y ago
    Or maybe it's what is repeated here so often: don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Is that what you tell hundreds of thousands of passengers sitting in a terminal with canceled flights and confused airline employees during one of the biggest holiday weekends? If your credit card number gets stolen or worse, your identity, and it's up to you to get that straightened out, are you just going to shrug your shoulders and write that off as the inevitable impossibility of perfection?
    • ams6110 9y ago
      I'm saying yes, maybe that is the case. Maybe those scenarios are either a) cheaper to handle on occasion than building systems which will never fail, or b) unavoidable (with some low probability). Air travel itself is not 100% safe. Planes crash. People die. Yet we feel that the probabilities are enough in our favor that we accept it.
      • toyg 9y ago
        What? "We" don't accept anything: strict regulations and processes were put in place to reduce the probability of accidents to the absolute minimum. Did this stop manufacturers and airlines to spearhead this or that new plane? Maybe - very few companies can carry that sort of compliance effort; but it's why the public trust air travel as fundamentally safe (statistically speaking, it's probably safer than cars).