3 ms·

By selling that software to user once, then only improving it a year or two later based on any quirks that got enough people mad enough to actually send an emai

by judge2020 4y ago

By selling that software to user once, then only improving it a year or two later based on any quirks that got enough people mad enough to actually send an email to complain about it. If it’s too critical, then there goes a quarter of your user base.

remram 4y ago
If it's too critical, wouldn't they send an email about it? Can you act on telemetry faster than email? Why?
- jefftk 4y ago
  People have a high threshold for sending emails, and most users will never send them. So if a change only makes things a bit slower / crashier or makes things much worse but mostly just for users who don't complain, you don't know. In this case "Firefox crashes sometimes" remains true even after their fix reduced the number of crashes by 70%.
- sbergot 4y ago
  Because the email might be incomplete or not representative of the majority of users, leading you to work on irrelevant problems.
- lkbm 4y ago
  > If it's too critical, wouldn't they send an email about it? Usually no. I very rarely email software providers to complain about their software. I'll usually just uninstall. Some software has more of a relationship with users than others. Doing support for B2B SaaS, I knew many of the users by name, and they knew me. Even then, though, some people would just live with terrible bugs for a long time. We once had an issue where the initial page post login would take 30+ seconds to load because it synchronously calculated a bunch of their stats. I don't recall anyone writing in to complain, and when I fixed it, I don't think they said anything. (The slowdown was a boiled frog situation, since it got slower as they grew.) Because it was a website, we could see the load time, and I saw it and fixed it, but if it were desktop software, the only way we'd have known would have been to load up a test account with hundreds of thousands of fake users and orders and fake shipments, and gone through the process of using the fake data in a real way. Load testing is obviously good, but it will never beat being able to see how it performs for real users, and just hoping those real users will report back to you is completely unrealistic. Don't get me wrong: I handled thousands of bug reports and feature requests during my time in support, and we got a lot of useful feedback. But insight into the actual performance is critical. Major bugs will go unreported for a long time. People just expect software to be buggy these days.
trap_goes_hot 4y ago
They also sold bug-fix support contracts for customers who could afford it.

remram 4y ago

If it's too critical, wouldn't they send an email about it? Can you act on telemetry faster than email? Why?

jefftk 4y ago
People have a high threshold for sending emails, and most users will never send them. So if a change only makes things a bit slower / crashier or makes things much worse but mostly just for users who don't complain, you don't know. In this case "Firefox crashes sometimes" remains true even after their fix reduced the number of crashes by 70%.
sbergot 4y ago
Because the email might be incomplete or not representative of the majority of users, leading you to work on irrelevant problems.
lkbm 4y ago
> If it's too critical, wouldn't they send an email about it? Usually no. I very rarely email software providers to complain about their software. I'll usually just uninstall. Some software has more of a relationship with users than others. Doing support for B2B SaaS, I knew many of the users by name, and they knew me. Even then, though, some people would just live with terrible bugs for a long time. We once had an issue where the initial page post login would take 30+ seconds to load because it synchronously calculated a bunch of their stats. I don't recall anyone writing in to complain, and when I fixed it, I don't think they said anything. (The slowdown was a boiled frog situation, since it got slower as they grew.) Because it was a website, we could see the load time, and I saw it and fixed it, but if it were desktop software, the only way we'd have known would have been to load up a test account with hundreds of thousands of fake users and orders and fake shipments, and gone through the process of using the fake data in a real way. Load testing is obviously good, but it will never beat being able to see how it performs for real users, and just hoping those real users will report back to you is completely unrealistic. Don't get me wrong: I handled thousands of bug reports and feature requests during my time in support, and we got a lot of useful feedback. But insight into the actual performance is critical. Major bugs will go unreported for a long time. People just expect software to be buggy these days.

trap_goes_hot 4y ago

They also sold bug-fix support contracts for customers who could afford it.