Have you ever heard of an SLA? This "used to be" story about software has never been true. If you can't meet the agreement, then or now, you're done.
I will admit, My judgement of 'non-consumer-software' is somewhat based on my corporate experience, where either:
- The contract with the vendor writing/providing software to the company is written so poorly that absolutely counter-intuitive decisions are made to try to steer the ship at the last moment, because the contract was written so bad there is no support
- For SaaS-ish offerings, the company would have some guy in a corner fixing the bugs in the data within the SLA, not necessarily fixing the actual bug causing the problem.
- You're lucky enough to be at a shop where the requirements are handled well enough that, yes, to your point, You have SLAs and things get fixed or there are penalties involved.
I will however stand by my original point; Before the days of the Internet and automatic updates (let alone 'SaaS web apps',) shipping an update could still be very expensive from a cost perspective.
Comments
Have you ever heard of an SLA? This "used to be" story about software has never been true. If you can't meet the agreement, then or now, you're done.
Software has always been a lot more diverse than just consumer goods. Why is that your only evidence of how you think software projects are managed?
I will admit, My judgement of 'non-consumer-software' is somewhat based on my corporate experience, where either:
- The contract with the vendor writing/providing software to the company is written so poorly that absolutely counter-intuitive decisions are made to try to steer the ship at the last moment, because the contract was written so bad there is no support
- For SaaS-ish offerings, the company would have some guy in a corner fixing the bugs in the data within the SLA, not necessarily fixing the actual bug causing the problem.
- You're lucky enough to be at a shop where the requirements are handled well enough that, yes, to your point, You have SLAs and things get fixed or there are penalties involved.
I will however stand by my original point; Before the days of the Internet and automatic updates (let alone 'SaaS web apps',) shipping an update could still be very expensive from a cost perspective.