Do you make manufacturers of popular services accountable for errors?
In this post I will consider such a thing as “cumulative responsibility”, is there enough free competition to regulate the quality of socially important services, why people are not demanding services, what is our legislation ready for and are there “free” services?
Immediately I will explain that by manufacturers I mean not programmers, as such, respected and beloved by me, but rather those people, by whose decision we use services as they are with all their pluses and minuses.
This concept has long been spinning in the minds of users, but not everyone is able to realize its significance. Will explain. Suppose you are a developer of a service that is used by 20 million people. And you are making a mistake that introduces into the micro-attacks the fury of each user.
I will give examples:
1. Mobile Yandex card application. The guys had an excellent service, for this reason their popularity significantly exceeded the Google solution. This spring there was a big release of Yandex maps with significant changes. Made more readable names, traffic jams look a little better steel and do not conflict with the paved route. But that hellish amount of new bugs and lost functionality levels all their efforts. The most critical:
1) The search from their automatic address substitution does not always work - you have to use your fingers to search for the desired house, which is indicated there and click “create a route”
2) When the cell phone is restarted, the constructed route is reset.
3) With a practically free main road, it leads along absolutely free roads, back streets or gravel roads
')
2. Notes embedded in HTC Sense 3.6 - a great app! They programmed everything that is possible there: both a photo and a voice recorder and a video, it seems that even handwriting recognition was added. Lost one little thing - autosave. The note is saved only when you press the hardware button "Back". If you type a note during the day, turn off the application and switch to others, and at the end of the day the battery died and the mobile phone rebooted, you will have to train the memory and restore the data yourself. At a recent exhibition of our product, I wrote useful thoughts and contacts all day, and when I got into the phone the next day, I transferred the data to the contact book ... In general, the Hulk rushed out and wanted to kill.
3. Facebook is an embarrassing feeling when information about the mail on your page was replaced with a Facebook postman.
4. The wind-up program “notes” does not respond to scrolling, and when inserting text, it retains the formatting of the source, preventing it from leading to a common style.
I think everyone can find a lot of examples of curves of programs with which millions work, nevertheless bringing the developer enough profit for high-quality development.
How critical are such cases when a minor inconvenience is caused to a huge number of people? Is it worse or better than the significant suffering of one person?
If you stick to the option that it is better to pinch a thousand people than to hurt one, I will give a more real example. Who should assign a prison term more, to an official who stole one ruble from people all over the country and rescued from it 140 million rubles or a teenager who robbed a neighbor, carrying 15 thousand rubles out of an apartment and leaving her without any means of existence at all? I believe that impartial legislation will be more strict with the official. But would it not be worthwhile to do the same with providers of socially significant services? But not only legislation, but also our consciousness is not ready for such an attitude. Most users are willing to look at it through their fingers or throw the gadget at the wall, instead of contacting the feedback section.
What for us are applications such as maps, soc. networks, search engines? If 10 years ago, people traveled to new cities with the help of paper maps and gesticulate voice signs of local residents, today it is difficult to imagine a comfortable journey without Yandex maps and Google maps. Some try to live without social networks, but their communication circle is narrowed, and after a dozen years, natural life processes will grow so deeply into the social network that refuse them will look just like a religious hermit .
Based on the fact that the service becomes necessary for comfortable life, it can be safely attributed to natural monopolies, such as gas, electricity or heating. It is to the monopolies, since in the case of the cards it is not necessary to talk about developed competition, where you can easily choose another supplier. Entering the market entails enormous costs, and it’s not so easy for the user to change the Yandex cards in Moscow to Google.
Historically, monopolies needed regulation either by the state or by associations called SROs (self-regulatory organizations). Regulation is necessary for the following reasons:
1. Ensuring the quality of services. Details on the example of US power can be read here . So, before the regulation of the electricity market in the United States began, manufacturers and network organizations themselves came up with a proposal to set their tariff and quality level. This step insured conscientious companies investing in the development and quality of products from competitors who wanted to dump, reducing the value of the kernel and not paying attention to the medium and long-term consequences, without thinking about development and reputation. Fears of American energy companies flourish picturesquely in today's unregulated market, when the curators like Groupon and Biglion are killing entire markets, throwing out cheap substandard services, delaying a large mass of demand and leaving no chance for companies to develop that do not want to sacrifice quality.
2. The second task of regulation is the balance of prices for the service - this functionality insures consumers against discriminatory high prices. For example, we have a boiler room in a village where only pensioners live. Winter comes, and the owner of the boiler room decides to raise the price 10 times. Consumers have no way out, they will give the last money for the sake of heat. And here prices, if applications are free? There is nothing free. In this case, compensation is not money as such. We benefit every like, every click or glance at the advertising banner, pay, communicating personal data, leaving opinions and even talking about the application. In fact, people work out what should have a monetary expression. Failure to understand this is a problem in many areas. When a person thinks that he gets something for free, he does not require quality from consumed products. The most painful example of our country is health care. Many believe that there is free medicine and paid. From the free one does not require young and successful professionals, the lack of queues, high-quality honey. equipment, polite staff and renovated buildings. What can be expected from free? Does everybody know that from this year, deductions from the income of each person to “free” medicine amount to 5%? Considered the amount of money paid by you personally?
Perhaps on the part of major developers it would be right to create an SRO with a single independent center of competence and gathering feedback. It can be a single open information space where users could leave parameterized reviews with minimal effort. They need to be parameterized so that it can be determined on the scale of whole communities, what exactly is not pleasant in the functional, what consequences it has suffered, and who is responsible for the fluctuations of the masses. At the moment, all these data can be obtained in some form, but judging by the fact that the same Yandex for half a year did not fix half of the bugs that users wrote in the Google market, we can conclude that for this task you need a control mechanism from the outside . If a few competitors do not faithfully perform these functions, you can connect public services. One thing is clear - work in this regard will not have to begin today, it means tomorrow, when precedents of harm to entire communities will have a global character.
Our consumer needs to cultivate exactingness and intolerance for all substandard. Do not curse the heads of companies or programmers, and carry constructive suppliers. My advice has already been taken by the developers of the Svyaznoybank Internet bank, the developers of ChompSMS (guys in Australia), the developers of the mobile version of Alfabank, the creators of Asana.com, and others. It is always a pleasure to receive a letter from a grateful user who likes your product and asks for something to improve. Kind words and constructive criticism favor cooperation :-)
If someone has skepticism about the topic, I suggest thinking about the following:
I am sure that many users experienced this exciting moment when you go in the far left lane at a speed of 80;) and shortly before the rebuild, the route gets lost. It’s not always possible to stop, the turn is already somewhere close, and suddenly the chameleon’s vision begins to develop, when with one eye on the road, and with the second one you dial the address “Small Cross Lane 4a / 43” on a shaking screen ...
Think about whether there is any traffic accident statistics due to a crash or an awkward navigator interface? Or at least the statistics of these fatal accidents? Are developers aware of the consequences of their bug or curvature of the interface? Who should be held accountable for the terrible tragedy due to the developer’s frivolous attitude to their product?
UPD: The conclusions that can be made by reading the comments, this is what the developers do not want to recognize the responsibility, which is quite expected. The main argument: "If the user is stupid and does not read the license agreement, then let him pay for his own stupidity, even if the price is life"
Thanks for the opinions. We are developers ourselves and adhere to a different position. We create and will create systems where programs adapt to a person, and not the user should teach instructions, where we are looking for the most stupid user and arrange everything so that he will never get into a difficult situation because of his stupidity. An ideal system does not exist, but we must strive towards this. Look a little further than your compiler. To think about people, about users first. Even if they are more stupid than we would like.
Thanks for the reaction and for the cons and for the pros.
Immediately I will explain that by manufacturers I mean not programmers, as such, respected and beloved by me, but rather those people, by whose decision we use services as they are with all their pluses and minuses.
Cumulative liability
This concept has long been spinning in the minds of users, but not everyone is able to realize its significance. Will explain. Suppose you are a developer of a service that is used by 20 million people. And you are making a mistake that introduces into the micro-attacks the fury of each user.
I will give examples:
1. Mobile Yandex card application. The guys had an excellent service, for this reason their popularity significantly exceeded the Google solution. This spring there was a big release of Yandex maps with significant changes. Made more readable names, traffic jams look a little better steel and do not conflict with the paved route. But that hellish amount of new bugs and lost functionality levels all their efforts. The most critical:
1) The search from their automatic address substitution does not always work - you have to use your fingers to search for the desired house, which is indicated there and click “create a route”
2) When the cell phone is restarted, the constructed route is reset.
3) With a practically free main road, it leads along absolutely free roads, back streets or gravel roads
')
2. Notes embedded in HTC Sense 3.6 - a great app! They programmed everything that is possible there: both a photo and a voice recorder and a video, it seems that even handwriting recognition was added. Lost one little thing - autosave. The note is saved only when you press the hardware button "Back". If you type a note during the day, turn off the application and switch to others, and at the end of the day the battery died and the mobile phone rebooted, you will have to train the memory and restore the data yourself. At a recent exhibition of our product, I wrote useful thoughts and contacts all day, and when I got into the phone the next day, I transferred the data to the contact book ... In general, the Hulk rushed out and wanted to kill.
3. Facebook is an embarrassing feeling when information about the mail on your page was replaced with a Facebook postman.
4. The wind-up program “notes” does not respond to scrolling, and when inserting text, it retains the formatting of the source, preventing it from leading to a common style.
I think everyone can find a lot of examples of curves of programs with which millions work, nevertheless bringing the developer enough profit for high-quality development.
How critical are such cases when a minor inconvenience is caused to a huge number of people? Is it worse or better than the significant suffering of one person?
If you stick to the option that it is better to pinch a thousand people than to hurt one, I will give a more real example. Who should assign a prison term more, to an official who stole one ruble from people all over the country and rescued from it 140 million rubles or a teenager who robbed a neighbor, carrying 15 thousand rubles out of an apartment and leaving her without any means of existence at all? I believe that impartial legislation will be more strict with the official. But would it not be worthwhile to do the same with providers of socially significant services? But not only legislation, but also our consciousness is not ready for such an attitude. Most users are willing to look at it through their fingers or throw the gadget at the wall, instead of contacting the feedback section.
Natural monopolies and their regulation
What for us are applications such as maps, soc. networks, search engines? If 10 years ago, people traveled to new cities with the help of paper maps and gesticulate voice signs of local residents, today it is difficult to imagine a comfortable journey without Yandex maps and Google maps. Some try to live without social networks, but their communication circle is narrowed, and after a dozen years, natural life processes will grow so deeply into the social network that refuse them will look just like a religious hermit .
Based on the fact that the service becomes necessary for comfortable life, it can be safely attributed to natural monopolies, such as gas, electricity or heating. It is to the monopolies, since in the case of the cards it is not necessary to talk about developed competition, where you can easily choose another supplier. Entering the market entails enormous costs, and it’s not so easy for the user to change the Yandex cards in Moscow to Google.
Historically, monopolies needed regulation either by the state or by associations called SROs (self-regulatory organizations). Regulation is necessary for the following reasons:
1. Ensuring the quality of services. Details on the example of US power can be read here . So, before the regulation of the electricity market in the United States began, manufacturers and network organizations themselves came up with a proposal to set their tariff and quality level. This step insured conscientious companies investing in the development and quality of products from competitors who wanted to dump, reducing the value of the kernel and not paying attention to the medium and long-term consequences, without thinking about development and reputation. Fears of American energy companies flourish picturesquely in today's unregulated market, when the curators like Groupon and Biglion are killing entire markets, throwing out cheap substandard services, delaying a large mass of demand and leaving no chance for companies to develop that do not want to sacrifice quality.
2. The second task of regulation is the balance of prices for the service - this functionality insures consumers against discriminatory high prices. For example, we have a boiler room in a village where only pensioners live. Winter comes, and the owner of the boiler room decides to raise the price 10 times. Consumers have no way out, they will give the last money for the sake of heat. And here prices, if applications are free? There is nothing free. In this case, compensation is not money as such. We benefit every like, every click or glance at the advertising banner, pay, communicating personal data, leaving opinions and even talking about the application. In fact, people work out what should have a monetary expression. Failure to understand this is a problem in many areas. When a person thinks that he gets something for free, he does not require quality from consumed products. The most painful example of our country is health care. Many believe that there is free medicine and paid. From the free one does not require young and successful professionals, the lack of queues, high-quality honey. equipment, polite staff and renovated buildings. What can be expected from free? Does everybody know that from this year, deductions from the income of each person to “free” medicine amount to 5%? Considered the amount of money paid by you personally?
Results
Perhaps on the part of major developers it would be right to create an SRO with a single independent center of competence and gathering feedback. It can be a single open information space where users could leave parameterized reviews with minimal effort. They need to be parameterized so that it can be determined on the scale of whole communities, what exactly is not pleasant in the functional, what consequences it has suffered, and who is responsible for the fluctuations of the masses. At the moment, all these data can be obtained in some form, but judging by the fact that the same Yandex for half a year did not fix half of the bugs that users wrote in the Google market, we can conclude that for this task you need a control mechanism from the outside . If a few competitors do not faithfully perform these functions, you can connect public services. One thing is clear - work in this regard will not have to begin today, it means tomorrow, when precedents of harm to entire communities will have a global character.
Our consumer needs to cultivate exactingness and intolerance for all substandard. Do not curse the heads of companies or programmers, and carry constructive suppliers. My advice has already been taken by the developers of the Svyaznoybank Internet bank, the developers of ChompSMS (guys in Australia), the developers of the mobile version of Alfabank, the creators of Asana.com, and others. It is always a pleasure to receive a letter from a grateful user who likes your product and asks for something to improve. Kind words and constructive criticism favor cooperation :-)
If someone has skepticism about the topic, I suggest thinking about the following:
I am sure that many users experienced this exciting moment when you go in the far left lane at a speed of 80;) and shortly before the rebuild, the route gets lost. It’s not always possible to stop, the turn is already somewhere close, and suddenly the chameleon’s vision begins to develop, when with one eye on the road, and with the second one you dial the address “Small Cross Lane 4a / 43” on a shaking screen ...
Think about whether there is any traffic accident statistics due to a crash or an awkward navigator interface? Or at least the statistics of these fatal accidents? Are developers aware of the consequences of their bug or curvature of the interface? Who should be held accountable for the terrible tragedy due to the developer’s frivolous attitude to their product?
UPD: The conclusions that can be made by reading the comments, this is what the developers do not want to recognize the responsibility, which is quite expected. The main argument: "If the user is stupid and does not read the license agreement, then let him pay for his own stupidity, even if the price is life"
Thanks for the opinions. We are developers ourselves and adhere to a different position. We create and will create systems where programs adapt to a person, and not the user should teach instructions, where we are looking for the most stupid user and arrange everything so that he will never get into a difficult situation because of his stupidity. An ideal system does not exist, but we must strive towards this. Look a little further than your compiler. To think about people, about users first. Even if they are more stupid than we would like.
Thanks for the reaction and for the cons and for the pros.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/157591/
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