What a PR disaster. It only takes one incident like this to tank a product. Testing is so important for IOT stuff but it usually gets shipped out way before it’s ready.
Outside of various geeks though I'm not sure that word of most vulnerabilities with internet connected cameras reaches a wider audience.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/4ortwb/i_bought_an...
I agree this is an egregious miss, but absolutely understandable from an engineers perspective.
I’m sure no one is happy with this outcome.
If you're FAANG-like and have 100M users an edge case that only affects 1% of customers still affects 1M people. Something that affects 0.1% still hits 100,000. Even at 0.01% you've still infuriated a small town's worth of people.
I'd hope that the average FAANG employee is smart/aware enough to realise that even edge and corner cases represent significant problems, even if all you care about is PR. (Although worth thinking about what might happen if you're Netflix and all these people decide to cancel subscriptions.)
(Incidentally, there's one plausible and recent example I'm aware of: issues with Macbook Pro butterfly keyboards.)
Probably not much. The thing is, from business POV, deprioritizing edge cases can be a rational choice. It depends on how much the impact of an edge case is amplified. At the very base, if you piss off 0.01% of your users, you lose 0.01% of your revenue, which is not much and can be ignored. However, if that 0.01% can get a Twitter shitstorm rolling to the point it reaches mainstream media, suddenly the damage may be far greater.
WRT. examples - any time myself or someone else mentions that a piece of software is designed to prevent productive/efficient use of it, or loses such a feature, you can see responses that amount to "power users are small minority, why would one care about them". The annoying thing is (besides showing the disrespect to other people's time), this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't leave room for user to get better at using your software, they will never get better at using it and you won't have power users.
The new owner couldn’t add Netflix to it until the old owner removed their “sync”, even though the old owner wasn’t a subscriber anymore!
It pays to not give a shit about security to get the product out faster. See e.g. WhatsApp. They had monthly breaches but still got big, and then cleaned up their act.
Had they tried to do it right from the start, a more aggressive and reckless competitor might have eaten their lunch.