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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

If I get this right, we have a $1+ trillion company not being able to build a basic functionality into their phones? (like "phone calls don't work" and the whole calling 911 issue). And, apparently, that was happening because of a shitty app built by another $1+ trillion company? In terms of innovation the US tech scene is toast with these dinosaurs.

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Bugs happen everywhere, to everyone. The fact that it happened is not a surprise - the lack of an immediate fix is what is concerning

When it’s a matter of life and death, like in this case, bugs shouldn’t just happen. If your sw product gets too complex so that you’re not able to control anymore of life-threatening bugs then you should make sure that said product gets rid of its complexity so that the engineers can have a better grasp of it.

If that still doesn’t happen then it’s a job for the regulators to step again because, again, this is a life and death situation.

How could the regulators possibly improve this situation?

Banning the product and forcing the manufacturer to pay damages to every single person they sold that garbage to, for example.

I would love this, though there's very few entities in the world that seem to have this level of sovereign power - most regulatory agencies / governments don't seem to have the political will, drive, ambition, or simply ability to do something like this.

Let's say for the USA, the chair of the FCC (hahahahahahahahaahah) decided to do this, could they even? Isn't power dispersed enough to make this impossible? (immediately challenged by courts, or, unable to determine which regulatory agency in USA actually has authority to do this, etc?) Or say an American state, perhaps Texas, decides to protect its citizens by threatening to ban sales of google phones if they don't fix this bug tomorrow, and force a recall, would that be possible? I mean... via what mechanism could that even happen? A governor executive order immediately challenged by a local court or even the USA federal government? A state law, that gets vetoed? Etc.

This leaving aside the fact that Google can just do fat campaign donations to whoever can throw a monkeywrench into this kind of consumer protection action.

You are probably overthinking this.

As much as the deregulatory agenda is ascendant, the FCC does have authority to regulate … wireless carriers and interstate commerce.

In particular, 47 USC 618(a)(6) provides an explicit right of mandamus if the FCC fails to act (I suppose this is mainly for venue). I’m not a lawyer but I’m pretty sure you could compel the FCC to, however indirectly, compel Google to act.

Suppose that the penalty for this was that you were forced to halt sales and offer a full refund to all purchasers the original price until your phones’ emergency function worked. I’d bet that Google would magically be able to repurpose some of their billions in profits to hiring some QA testers.

You can't do much about the stuff out there now, but you can make punishments so painful companies simply regulate themselves. It's all math to them - if the punishment is more expensive than doing it right the first time, it gets done right the first time, usually.

But you have to agree the state of MS Teams is an absolute shitshow. The quality is like it's put together by a bunch of guys coding on their spare time if they feel like it.

That would be a passion project. I find it hard to conceive of Teams as a passion project, except possibly by people who have a passion for hating the world.

If Microsoft has a penchant for hiring people passionate about hating the world that would explain a lot of their software over the years.

If MS software is the worst software you’ve used, you’re living a pretty good life.

There are businesses running on software that makes Teams look like a paragon of performance, stability and user-focused UI/UX.

> If MS software is the worst software you’ve used, you’re living a pretty good life.

I've used much worse, almost always enterprise software.

That doesn't excuse Microsoft, but ultimately I just make sure my personal life and my jobs stay as far away from their software as I can.

> There are businesses running on software that makes Teams look like a paragon of performance, stability and user-focused UI/UX.

Those (probably) aren’t trillion dollar businesses.

SAP has a market cap of $135B, not a trillion dollar business but in the top 100 largest companies in the world.

or if something about working at MS instills in people a passion for hating the world...

Normally failures like this would be addressed through legislation. Perhaps a $10,000 fine per 911 call failure incident. With regulatory capture and half the voting population against regulation, this is unlikely to happen though.

Short of that, boycotts could be organized. Maybe a senior executive at T-Mobile loses their kid in a car accident because the 911 call didn't go through. So they decide to drop Google for 2 years or something.

Soon this sort of B2B boycott could be illegal:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/11/alec-anti-po...

More and more avenues that help common working people stand up to monopoly/duopoly, wealth inequality and other forms of power imbalance are being deemed political.

And in another thread people talk how "real programmers don't need unit tests", oh the irony.

“With thousands of people using your phones, it'll be clear pretty quickly when something as crucial as 911 stops working. You shouldn't need tests for that.”

Not sure why you're getting downvoted - I think your comment is fair. As said in the OP article "911 is not a favor to us. It’s required".

Why people keep saying 1B+, 1T+ compagny, if you don't want bugs don't use software, the size of the compagny does not matter.

Of course it matters, why such a black and white statement? The assumption is that a well funded company should be able to finance a quality assurance team which fixes bugs the developers create

Market cap is not revenue. While Google and Microsoft do have a lot of revenue, saying "trillion dollar company" is a tacit suggestion they're sitting on a trillion dollar dragon hoard.

Their profitability compared to profits is a more logically consistent comparison. If they recognize a billion dollars in profit while shipping brain dead bugs it goes to demonstrate their lack of respect for customers.

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