|
|
|
|
|
|
by MichaelZuo
44 days ago
|
|
|
Why shouldn’t software be treated with the same rigor at Volkswagen scale? Pretty much all software products typically talked about on HN are laughable at that scale, they have crashes or weird bugs way more often than the six sigma norm of 99.9999% reliability. For example, I don’t think it’s even possible nowadays to buy a new iPad and use it with default apps and settings for any significant duration continuously. It’s well under 1 million minutes of uptime before failure and a hard restart is needed. So anything more complex than the simplest possible use case of an iPad is even more of a joke under hardware norms. |
|
|
No one said that it shouldn't.
What I wrote is, that the approach of minimizing any SURFACE of risk in software creates the (subjectively good and solid) software of previous car-generations (in Volkswagen terms: MIB2 ~ a bit downhill already in MIB3): A solid, predictable and closed product fulfilling its core use-case.
But it DOESN'T create a user experience with those "fun" niche features, competitive remote-access Smartphone features, exposed API's, sudden new features during lifecycle, funny "ludicrous modes" etc.
And today's customers are demanding those features, it's now a hygiene factor for a premium experience on Smartphones as well as on cars.
A Tesla is not considered a "Premium" car because of its premium hardware or manufacturing quality. They disrupted the car-industry by being the first to apply a software-dev mindset to it, and the consumer perceives this as premium.