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ymerej

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Doesn't it all boil down to economics in the end? When I worked at AOL, QA was very important/valued because our SW was shipped on CDs (I know, I know), and every bug/update cost us users because we had to download an update at modem speed. Now that I work on a web development team, bugs are easily fixed by an update. So who cares if there's a bug? We can just update the site. There are other costs, of course -- if we tolerate lots of bugs and tech debt, making development slower, we will evenually have our lunch eaten -- that's economics too.

Users/customers accept a certain level of quality, and it doesn't make short-term economic sense to provide more.

Speaking of ICQ, I remember when AOL bought out ICQ and had a huge engineering success when they pulled the switch and all of sudden, ICQ users were seamlessly on the AIM infrastructure. When you think of the sizes of those networks it was really amazing.

I went through what must be five cycles of returning counterfeit Samsung batteries (easy to detect counterfeit -- the NFC didn't work) to get replacements which were counterfeit. Chatting with customer service was an exercise in futility.