Research In Motion’s co-CEO Jim Balsillie claims buggy software is the new reality.
It’s not. Rushing an incomplete or defective product to market simply meet some artificial management or stockmarket imposed deadline is the old thinking.
The IT industry got away with this while the market was immature and the credit boom meant embarrassing mistakes could be hidden under the rising tide.
In mobile phones the market is far too competitive. The poorly executed Storm sold 500,000 units is because Blackberry was using the better Verizon network rather than the patchy AT&T service the iPhone is tied to.
In Australia, the Storm sells at a substantial discount to the Bold or iPhone on the same networks simply because the market knows the Storm a substandard product.
This “nearly good enough” thinking from the tech sector is one of the reasons the world economy is in trouble now. It is really just contempt for the customer that has been common across many industries where fat, ever growning margins were assumed to go on forever.
If anything positive comes out of the Global Financial Crisis it will be the culture of mediocrity dies as big business becomes subject to the same pressures the rest of the economy has always lived with.
For the rest of us our products have to be 100%. We cannot afford to do anything less than delight our customers.
In a competitive market, if you are disappointing your customers with substandard products then your business won’t survive.