[bklyn11201]

Another conclusion was that a tiered subscription model that withholds life-saving information is a business I never want to be in. El Faro subscribed to the Bon Voyage System for weather updates, but they didn't subscribe to the routing guidance and always received six hour-old information. The stale data is a critical part of this story.

http://www.stormgeo.com/solutions/shipping/on-board-services...

[user5994461]

Another conclusion is to never be in a business that tries to save pennies by not subscribing to life critical data.

[yread]

Another important part are the flashy graphics. People always trust you more with flashy graphics against a list of coordinates

[hinkley]

As a professional curmudgeon, I have the same reaction to shiny graphics that I do to salesman I’m fancy suits: I’m not buying.

Charting data accurately is really really hard. On one team we had a guy who said charts are for asking questions, not making decisions, and I’ve found that to be a pretty safe default.

[radicalbyte]

..and buggy software.

[dmix]

The stale data seemed to be partially a result of the software glitch. Therefore it's not clear at all that adding a "routing guidance" model on top of the same data would have been any better solution. The captain already established his own route given the same, largely wrong, data.

What they needed was hourly updates, which they had from the other service they subscribed to, which was ignored by the captain. Despite the staff being fully aware.

And the captain and staff should always be reading weather data from two sources anyway, for redundancy and accuracy.

These guys had plenty of information but over-relied on one which was 6-12hrs out-of-date at the worst time, which no indication it was old data.

These are solvable problems that have little to do with tiered pricing or a cheapness on part of the company. Both by the above redundancy and the weather company dating their data, and fixing software bugs for such critical software.