Could Satan himself—
In all his shining-dark craftiness—
Have devised a plot so sinister
As releasing a software without
Adequate support,
Or a service without
Adequate description?
I see it again and again. Big tech rushes to market with a software that’s not ready, and doesn’t care about the tortures this will exact on the customer. And they they stoop to “nudge” the customer forward in the subscription by refusing to divulge what the software does, as if the priority in the matter is to get the customer’s registration information, rather than to provide the customer with a useful service.
We are the cattle in their chute. And when their not-ready-for-market products are still not ready five years after launch, we can reconsider whether it was a mistake at all, and ponder the possibility that it is, in fact, a policy.
It is certainly true that there are those who do not care about what’s best for the customer, but only about what can be gained from the customer. The good-faith win/win paradigm is foolishness to them. They are brazen about it, as if soulless.
Many begin in the error of planning bias—in underestimating how long it will take to be ready for market—so they launch, being not fully ready to take care of the customer. But what do they do from then forward? Do they call for all hands on deck to solve the problems? Or do they relax themselves once they see that the money is coming in? They sit on the brink, from where they will decide between The Lie and the Error as their moral disposition. That is, we got here by not being ready, but will we shift over into not caring—as a matter of deliberate policy—that we’re not ready? Or to put it differently, what began as an “Oops!” evolve into a “Gotcha!”?
It seems to me there was once a business paradigm in this country—adopted by some, mind you, and not by all—that a company should take pride in assuring high quality in its products and services. Many today, however, seem to take pride in sticking it to the customer—in winning at the customer’s expense. And I don’t have the statistics to know whether it’s getting worse, but it certainly seems to be.
This much, I’m certain of, however: Twenty years ago, when you launched a new web service, you took pains to explain to your customer before the sale, just what your software did. Now, that explanation is noticeably absent, and the customer is treated like an idiot—expected to subscribe first, and find out later, and even in some cases where it is a paid service!
And yes, they have to know that this will be a great aggravation to some, even if not to the duller consumers in this market—yet they do it anyway. And surely, this breaks the Golden Rule, for who among them would want to be treated this way themselves?
It is evil at its core. And whether they started that way or not, they’ve landed firmly on the “Gotcha!” side, whether they pretend to be on the “Oops!” side or not. And in either case, the right thing to do is to fix it, or remove the product from the market.
And yes, I’m sure they have other considerations, such as what the competition is doing, and whether the market will pay enough for the service to fund all the support labor that’s truly necessary to do it right. And certainly, a wise and moral company would have thought of all of this in advance. But even so, having miscalculated at first, they’re in the bind now, and they are in a position to make the hard choices. And what they choose will show what kind of people they are—whether they’ll keep going after the money alone, or start going after a fair-trade, win/win transaction with the customer, after which both go home at the end of the day feeling good about the deal.
They come into the business for money, then they discover the dilemma between the money and doing what’s best for the customer, and then it brings—or should bring—the question back around to what philosophy they will have in the whole thing. And had they started with the win/win philosophy, they’d have done better from the get-go.
(This is quite similar to the 3-part pattern I highlight in my poem, Bits and Pieces.)
