| Two points: First, to extend what you said about startups, you generally aren't totally sure that the market is really there. If it turns out that nobody cares about what you're building, it doesn't matter what quality you built it with. Therefore, as long as it's cheaper to build it with lower quality, startups are rational to build it with little concern for quality. Second, Toyota: I'm not going to be any kind of apologist for Toyota's horrible software. From what I read about the situation, the way it was written was appalling. And they rightly got a lot of heat over it. (Arguably, they should have gotten more.) But I wonder if the quality bar isn't being set too high in this situation. If Toyota didn't implement things in software, they would have had to implement it in hardware (either mechanical or electrical). That hardware would have some failure modes and failure rate. If the software has a lower failure rate than the hardware, that's progress, even if the software has a higher failure rate than it should have. Our discussion of the Toyota flaws is colored by the fatalities. Still, hardware flaws can kill people, too... |