Yup. It might even be that while the engineering team is aware of the faults, the MS exec team considers Teams to be brilliant.
At the senior level the role becomes a sales role - you are continuously selling your output, team, product, vision, etc internally to the other execs, board, etc. It's important therefore to present whatever you are producing as exceptional. So you look for indicators that support your pitch. Sales and forecasts are far more important than product. Product is only as important as far as it directly impacts these numbers. And with channels / vertical integration / brand like MS, a core tool like Teams is almost a guaranteed success on these metrics as long as the product kinda works.
And then it's very easy to fall into the trap of buying into your own pitch. When you are continuously repeating how great the product is you begin believe it and ignore criticism, including public opinion. "What matters is the markets opinion not the publics opinion and Teams has huge market share".
So MS execs likely believe Teams to be brilliant, which is probably partly why there isn't the internal urgency to fix the issues.
Also - its a golden goose! Its good enough, generates tons of revenue and fills a strategic product gap. Why take a big risk and refactor it? This could be a disaster.
Takes a very brave, product focused leader to push on despite the above.
There was a reddit thread about this article yesterday and it was filled with people who were suddenly able to find their medication for orders of magnitude cheaper. This meant that for some it made an immediate and significant financial difference to their lives, and for others it meant access to medication they could not previously afford. In some cases reading this article was being described as "life saving".
This is very interesting but not because Cuban's business model is unique. It suggests that this group, who are probably a bit more net savvy on average, were not aware of other similar businesses like GoodRX.
This implies that there is a highly in demand product (cheap medication) but the problem is awareness, so it's a marketing challenge. Cuban is very well positioned to solve this problem by using his personal brand and tools like these PR articles.
This is a good thing! He has the brand, marketing chops and resources to drive it forward. It will increase the size of the market, meaning more people have access to life changing affordable medication. This may spawn more clones of the business model, further increasing the market size, rinse repeat. If this market gets big enough maybe it will apply pressure for change upstream? That would be a great thing.
Here on HN we are heavily weighted in our thinking towards the value of product in business (which is normally undervalued) and that is great, but examples like this reveal a real blind spot. Sometimes the value of something like marketing is forgotten or even worse dismissed. But they're extremely powerful tools when used correctly. Apply good marketing to a good product and you have Apple.
I hear that you're suggesting that those involved shouldnt feel bad because its a systemic / just a job / etc. But the reality is that incidents like this can be very traumatic for those involved and thats not something they can control. If it was that simple to manage, depression and anxiety would not be a thing.
Think its best to show a large amount of support and empathy for the individuals having a really bad day today, and how awful they may feel. Some will probably end up reading this thread (I know I would).
And of course, still hold Fastly the business accountable for their response (but objectively, once we understand what the root cause was, and the long term solution).
In my opinion over-engineering is a symptom of not enough thinking. Complex, over engineered solutions don't happen because a problem is too well understood, they happen because a problem is not understood well enough.
This is based on the assumption that more thinking == better understanding.
To be a little picky but it might help drive some further thinking - localization and translation are two different things and it looks like parrot does translation only? Translation is a subset of localization.
The two are conflated a lot, especially in gamedev. Translation is nice, but localization is a superpower.
Family killed by a truck driver doing exactly this, including dashcam footage showing how quickly this happens if you are distracted for even a tiny amount of time. Very scary.
Timing at high speed has a lot to do with it, and lots of things can distract drivers from the road but the margin of error is slim here and so it seems very reasonable to legislate against this.
The phone is about consuming/producing content and that's what many popular apps (like FB, Instagram, etc) are all about. No FB app on the watch indicates that the standard FB experience doesnt work on the platform, in the same way it wouldnt work on your kettle. That doesnt mean the kettle is a failure.
The watch is all about quick access to small, self-contained nuggets of information and simple actions. Previously, these have been limited to "what's the time?", "what's the date?", etc. With smart watches we can now have "what's next on my calendar?", "what's the weather like today?", "pay for this coffee", etc. They sound simple but they can quickly become habits. Developers will eventually work out which of these work, but this is a genuinely new platform - it will take time and iteration.
Additionally, any comparison to the iPad launch is unfair. The iPad, in terms of how it is used, really is just a big iPhone.
At the senior level the role becomes a sales role - you are continuously selling your output, team, product, vision, etc internally to the other execs, board, etc. It's important therefore to present whatever you are producing as exceptional. So you look for indicators that support your pitch. Sales and forecasts are far more important than product. Product is only as important as far as it directly impacts these numbers. And with channels / vertical integration / brand like MS, a core tool like Teams is almost a guaranteed success on these metrics as long as the product kinda works.
And then it's very easy to fall into the trap of buying into your own pitch. When you are continuously repeating how great the product is you begin believe it and ignore criticism, including public opinion. "What matters is the markets opinion not the publics opinion and Teams has huge market share".
So MS execs likely believe Teams to be brilliant, which is probably partly why there isn't the internal urgency to fix the issues.
Also - its a golden goose! Its good enough, generates tons of revenue and fills a strategic product gap. Why take a big risk and refactor it? This could be a disaster.
Takes a very brave, product focused leader to push on despite the above.