[noveltyaccount]

> "An employee manually entered a wrong number somewhere, causing an incorrect update. As a result, all combi microwaves of this type no longer work in the Benelux," says a spokesperson for the umbrella company Electrolux.

All????? They didn't roll out the release gradually? Holy hell.

[ChuckNorris89]

>They didn't roll out the release gradually? Holy hell.

Have you looked at dev wages for appliances? That explains everything in short. Everything has to be done for the cheapest price in the shortest amount of time. Fractions of cents are cut in every directions when possible. So when you're operating dev teams on shoe string budgets under constant crunch, there's no talent nor resources for sane management, dev and testing practices. Kind of like the game dev industry, but worse.

And the sad part is, there are really great devs stuck in that shitty industry, as it takes a lot of skill to write code so efficient it fits in undersized ROM or write firmware that can replace HW components.

Source: former embedded dev

[bitwize]

Makes you wonder why they don't take it to the extreme and remove the computer entirely.

[gpvos]

Because implementing the functionality in physical hardware instead of software is much, much more expensive.

[ahartmetz]

It really depends on the expected production numbers whether it makes sense to save on hardware. I have worked on expensive products of which only a few thousand were made, predictably because it was specialized stuff, and a lot of money was spent to make the software aceptably fast...

It's different for e.g. cars where it's typically millions, at least for the computing parts.

[jb1991]

Well, not all. Sounds like Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg were the beta-testers :)