4 ms·

Yeah, but then you'd have to raise the price to pay for the testing and the jokers a block down the street who YOLO'd their competing product into the marketpla

Yeah, but then you'd have to raise the price to pay for the testing and the jokers a block down the street who YOLO'd their competing product into the marketplace without testing would grab all your sales. You'd be out of business and your competitors would be laughing their way to the bank while the customers still suffered constantly from a broken product.

Jtsummers 6y ago
If it were only for novel products this would be a reasonable argument. See Netscape's rush to release their browser as an example of what you're talk about. But the worst part is that this is an issue with established products that have secured their market, and will even receive money every year from their customers. They have both the money and the time to pace themselves and test things properly, but they don't.
- pas 6y ago
  Can you name a few of those who really truly have time but don't take their time? Also it seems there's always an opportunity cost. So time is always "of the essence".
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    Right, you could be spending those dollars running ads, which the market is more likely to respond to :/
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    Microsoft, Apple, Google. An MS bug in an enterprise piece of software (so they get paid every year for it) is Skype for Business. Perhaps my org hasn't updated their installation, but if I drag a contact from the chat window (say you message me and aren't in my contacts yet) and then drag it to the contact list (in status view) it will reliably crash the program. If I drag it to groups view it'll place the contact in a group. My guess is that dragging it to status there is no "default" group and so there's some kind of null pointer exception occurring (it tries to add it but with group given as either junk or null). I used to see more bugs in Outlook, but it seems somewhat better with the last update so I haven't noticed them. Though it was fun when I had negative 2 billion messages for a week or so (I certainly didn't have enough to cause overflow so I have no idea how it wrapped around like that). Google's is an issue of usability of their webapps (IME), not strictly buggy but not sufficiently tested. Behind the proxy at work Maps is incredibly unreliable. It takes several reloads for it to actually start working "correctly", but don't change where you're looking too much (you can zoom in, but do not pan around). That's not the only unreliable one in this situation, but it is the most easily demonstrated. Apple's Messages and Mail constantly tell me (they've been better the last few months, but it still happens) that I have unread messages, I'd search and search and never find them. Then I'd pull it up on a different device and finally see the unread message (which was both visible and marked as read on the original device). Some of these may be shallow or seem petty, but it's an unpleasant experience that after so many years and with so much money should've been resolved for each of them. I'm willing to tolerate an indie game crashing on me. I'm not willing to tolerate an enterprise software solution (MS) crashing for a natural user behavior. EDIT: I think resolved, but Apple's iOS calculator bugs were annoying for such a simple program. Not strictly a bug, but Windows' calculator, these days, is an unusable mess in many ways. It shouldn't require so many system resources to add some numbers together (the same could be said of many small utilities that were rewritten for, I think, Windows 10 or Windows 8). Gmail showing me email meant for <first><last>@gmail.com instead of <first>.<last>@gmail.com. The fact that they ignored the . at all in the user names. The Youtube app on iOS when I first installed it and quickly uninstalled it years ago was an incredible annoyance. It wouldn't reliably show me the video I'd actually clicked on that caused the app to open. Adobe is an almost perfect example of holding their market captive. I've run into a number of Adobe Acrobat issues over the years, though fewer recently (but I use it less often now). But especially Acrobat Reader on Mac OS X was awful, I actually once had to reinstall the OS to get it to stop fucking up PDF display even after uninstalling the software (I never found out what it had done to the system, and gave up). I needed it because I couldn't find anything else (at the time) that supported digital signatures in PDFs on the Mac (in the sense that it actually worked, I think Preview let me do it but what it made wasn't usable by the people receiving the file). EDIT2: Another Google one, with Chrome on macOS in full screen. Hiding the location bar means you straight up can't get to it. You have to reenable it, versus a sane behavior like autohiding and moving the cursor to the top restoring it.
    - pas 6y ago
      Skype for Business is just Lync [used to be Office Communicator, maybe?] renamed/reskinned, right? I think that product is cursed. It was always a dumpster fire, like IBM's Lotus Notes. It's there so you their clients don't accidentally try Slack or any of the sane alternatives. All products of MS, Apple, Google are in a constant churn mode. New design. New integrations with whatever platform changes happened in the back, new features to match the competitors, new trends, new mobile apps, new browser features, new framework. Those are the products that are not the real products and not real money cows, so they get very limited attention. I agree all of these are horrible. GMail is still a slow piece of shit. I recently tried Thunderbird, and .. it slowed down too. Wtf. Slack is slow too. Typing has become slow for some reason in a lot of "apps", maybe too fancy fonts? Anyway, these companies have huge opportunity costs. Just look at Google. They try whatever crosses their mind and nothing is good enough compared to "ads". And so they shut them down because opportunity costs. (Not because upkeep, but because then your attention is not on the next big thing, whatever that will be.)
      - droobles 6y ago
        > I agree all of these are horrible. GMail is still a slow piece of shit. I recently tried Thunderbird, and .. it slowed down too. Wtf. Slack is slow too. Typing has become slow for some reason in a lot of "apps", maybe too fancy fonts? Possibly because more companies are moving desktop apps to Electron so they can run JS everywhere.
    - oever 6y ago
      So more telemetry is not a guarantee for bugs being fixed.
- solarkraft 6y ago
  > They have both the money and the time to pace themselves and test things properly, but they don't. But not the motivation, because "it works" and improving UX would cost money and doesn't have an immediately visible return.

Jtsummers 6y ago

If it were only for novel products this would be a reasonable argument. See Netscape's rush to release their browser as an example of what you're talk about. But the worst part is that this is an issue with established products that have secured their market, and will even receive money every year from their customers. They have both the money and the time to pace themselves and test things properly, but they don't.

pas 6y ago
Can you name a few of those who really truly have time but don't take their time? Also it seems there's always an opportunity cost. So time is always "of the essence".
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  Right, you could be spending those dollars running ads, which the market is more likely to respond to :/
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  Microsoft, Apple, Google. An MS bug in an enterprise piece of software (so they get paid every year for it) is Skype for Business. Perhaps my org hasn't updated their installation, but if I drag a contact from the chat window (say you message me and aren't in my contacts yet) and then drag it to the contact list (in status view) it will reliably crash the program. If I drag it to groups view it'll place the contact in a group. My guess is that dragging it to status there is no "default" group and so there's some kind of null pointer exception occurring (it tries to add it but with group given as either junk or null). I used to see more bugs in Outlook, but it seems somewhat better with the last update so I haven't noticed them. Though it was fun when I had negative 2 billion messages for a week or so (I certainly didn't have enough to cause overflow so I have no idea how it wrapped around like that). Google's is an issue of usability of their webapps (IME), not strictly buggy but not sufficiently tested. Behind the proxy at work Maps is incredibly unreliable. It takes several reloads for it to actually start working "correctly", but don't change where you're looking too much (you can zoom in, but do not pan around). That's not the only unreliable one in this situation, but it is the most easily demonstrated. Apple's Messages and Mail constantly tell me (they've been better the last few months, but it still happens) that I have unread messages, I'd search and search and never find them. Then I'd pull it up on a different device and finally see the unread message (which was both visible and marked as read on the original device). Some of these may be shallow or seem petty, but it's an unpleasant experience that after so many years and with so much money should've been resolved for each of them. I'm willing to tolerate an indie game crashing on me. I'm not willing to tolerate an enterprise software solution (MS) crashing for a natural user behavior. EDIT: I think resolved, but Apple's iOS calculator bugs were annoying for such a simple program. Not strictly a bug, but Windows' calculator, these days, is an unusable mess in many ways. It shouldn't require so many system resources to add some numbers together (the same could be said of many small utilities that were rewritten for, I think, Windows 10 or Windows 8). Gmail showing me email meant for <first><last>@gmail.com instead of <first>.<last>@gmail.com. The fact that they ignored the . at all in the user names. The Youtube app on iOS when I first installed it and quickly uninstalled it years ago was an incredible annoyance. It wouldn't reliably show me the video I'd actually clicked on that caused the app to open. Adobe is an almost perfect example of holding their market captive. I've run into a number of Adobe Acrobat issues over the years, though fewer recently (but I use it less often now). But especially Acrobat Reader on Mac OS X was awful, I actually once had to reinstall the OS to get it to stop fucking up PDF display even after uninstalling the software (I never found out what it had done to the system, and gave up). I needed it because I couldn't find anything else (at the time) that supported digital signatures in PDFs on the Mac (in the sense that it actually worked, I think Preview let me do it but what it made wasn't usable by the people receiving the file). EDIT2: Another Google one, with Chrome on macOS in full screen. Hiding the location bar means you straight up can't get to it. You have to reenable it, versus a sane behavior like autohiding and moving the cursor to the top restoring it.
  - pas 6y ago
    Skype for Business is just Lync [used to be Office Communicator, maybe?] renamed/reskinned, right? I think that product is cursed. It was always a dumpster fire, like IBM's Lotus Notes. It's there so you their clients don't accidentally try Slack or any of the sane alternatives. All products of MS, Apple, Google are in a constant churn mode. New design. New integrations with whatever platform changes happened in the back, new features to match the competitors, new trends, new mobile apps, new browser features, new framework. Those are the products that are not the real products and not real money cows, so they get very limited attention. I agree all of these are horrible. GMail is still a slow piece of shit. I recently tried Thunderbird, and .. it slowed down too. Wtf. Slack is slow too. Typing has become slow for some reason in a lot of "apps", maybe too fancy fonts? Anyway, these companies have huge opportunity costs. Just look at Google. They try whatever crosses their mind and nothing is good enough compared to "ads". And so they shut them down because opportunity costs. (Not because upkeep, but because then your attention is not on the next big thing, whatever that will be.)
    - droobles 6y ago
      > I agree all of these are horrible. GMail is still a slow piece of shit. I recently tried Thunderbird, and .. it slowed down too. Wtf. Slack is slow too. Typing has become slow for some reason in a lot of "apps", maybe too fancy fonts? Possibly because more companies are moving desktop apps to Electron so they can run JS everywhere.
  - oever 6y ago
    So more telemetry is not a guarantee for bugs being fixed.
solarkraft 6y ago
> They have both the money and the time to pace themselves and test things properly, but they don't. But not the motivation, because "it works" and improving UX would cost money and doesn't have an immediately visible return.