On Friday, 3 October 2014 at 19:05:51 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
But it is a business decision whether it is better to take
amazon.com off the network for a week or just let their search
engine occasionally serve food instead of books as search
results. Not an engineering decision.
It is a business decision whether it is better for a game to
corrupt 1% of user accounts and let customer support manually
build them back up than to take the game off the network until
the problem is fixed. You would probably have heavier load on
customer support and loose more subscriptions by taking the
game off the network than giving those 1% one year of free game
play as a compensation.
The thing is, the privilege to make that kind of business
decision is wholly dependent on the fact that there are no
meaningful safety issues involved.
Compare that to the case of the Ford Pinto. The allegation made
was that Ford had preferred to risk paying out lawsuits to
injured drivers over fixing a design flaw responsible for those
(serious) injuries, because a cost-benefit analysis had shown the
payouts were cheaper than rolling out the fix. This allegation
was rightly met with outrage, and severe punitive damages in
court.
