I ran an ecommerce platform for a decade, from inception to billions of pounds of customer throughout per annum. We always listened to our clients, and their w

I ran an ecommerce platform for a decade, from inception to billions of pounds of customer throughout per annum. We always listened to our clients, and their wants and needs, but we also always put the robustness and the reliability of the platform over any feature request, no matter how adamant, vocal, or lucrative the client. A big part of being a provider is to be the expert, to be the voice that says “what you are asking for is dangerous, and we will not do it”, and being prepared to sacrifice short term client pleasing for long term stability and overall client happiness. The customer is not the expert. They are not qualified to make decisions that endanger themselves and other customers. This is why they are paying you. Yes, they’ll be thrilled when they get their shiny new blank, but hellfire will rain upon you when you have an outage due to a poorly planned improvement. In my case, our worst case was revenue loss for our customers. In Boeing’s, their worst case is a terrifying death for hundreds of people. The picture here is that Boeing have been deeply irresponsible, and have let their short term goals compromise their long term stability, the quality of their product, and have forgone their duty of care.