[danielheath]

> If you want bulletproof software with guarantees (like the medical industry or aerospace or traffic light systems or banks) you'll get extremely conservative, boring old tech with no flashy new features all the time.

If users could actually evaluate the guarantees and have reasonable assurance that they would be upheld, I suspect this is exactly the direction the industry would take.

However, because it's unreasonably expensive to verify that those guarantees hold (relative to the value the software offers), end-users have no reason to prefer products that offer them to products which merely claim to be secure.

[bonoboTP]

You can verify it based on the legal warranty contract that you sign. The reason this is not offered is that consumers/prosumers would not be able to pay for it.

Turning a process/culture that works 99% of the time into 99.99% is often surprisingly expensive. For example currently as a company you may have some slightly less attentive engineers or less strict code review process for convenience and speed, or you may pursue lots of projects with tight deadlines etc. which can lead to a situation like this with non negligible chance, but usually won't. Most of the software you use doesn't routinely delete user data, it's an accident. To avoid it you need to hire higher quality engineers or more of them to give them breathing room and less workload, and have to give up on some new features and innovation, which is really not so easy in a competitive market.