Slowly going insane while waiting for a fix...
Over at Shirt Pocket, my friend and occasional co-conspirator Dave Nanian blogs about a bug in the OS that adversely affects his product and his customers' experience: Slowly going insane while waiting for a fix. In his post, he wrote something that really resonated with me:
This is really frustrating for our users, because things don’t work in a mysterious (and ungrammatical) way. And it’s frustrating for us, because it makes us look bad, incompetent and/or lazy. Honestly, we’re not.
We have had similar experiences, but I'll generalize: bugs and shortcomings in software beyond our control have the ability to profoundly and negatively affect our customers' experiences, and it's really frustrating for everyone — and for precisely the reasons Dave gives. (I'm likely to amplify on this in a future post.)