It’s all about risk profiles. The failure of a bridge or an airplane is catastrophic and people will die. If a SaaS provider is down for awhile, people are frustrated.
I think this used to be true, but we're not building toys anymore. Whether we like it or not, SaaS products are rapidly becoming transitive dependencies of mission critical, life/death infrastructure.
Last time i had to get roadside assistance, they couldn't use a mile marker / highway location reference. They had to have something to type into google maps in order to dispatch help.
Could they have gotten to me if google maps was down? Probably but i'm not sure. Either way, it wouldn't have been the practiced default and that matters.
It’s not just the developers, but the entire organizations they work within that prioritize shipping new features rather than reliability, because that’s generally what’s most profitable (at least in the short term). It’s hard to change those incentives for an entire organization.
The impact, whether economic or QoL or whatever metric you prefer to use, of a million frustrated people and the corresponding loss of productivity may not be insignificant.
And, obviously, software is in charge of actual security in the real world, and the track record there is not exactly flattering! Safety as well, of course, but luckily safety-critical software is a much smaller and usually more rigorous subfield, quite unlike the case with security.
Last time i had to get roadside assistance, they couldn't use a mile marker / highway location reference. They had to have something to type into google maps in order to dispatch help.
Could they have gotten to me if google maps was down? Probably but i'm not sure. Either way, it wouldn't have been the practiced default and that matters.