None whatsoever, their contracts with customers will limit liability to the price paid for the software/subscription. If there was open-ended liability for software failures then very little software would get written.
If someone is injured or dies because the hospital has inadequate backup processes in the event of a Windows outage, some or maybe all liability for negligence falls on those who designed the hospital that way, not the IT supplier who didn't agree to it.
The tool isn't fit for purpose
Is that even possible any more? (That said, "operate" isn't a boolean, it's a continuum between perfect service and none, with various levels of degraded service between, even if you mean "operate" in the sense of "perform a surgical operation" rather than "any treatment or care of any kind").
All medical notes being printed in hard-copy could be done, that's the relatively easy part. But there's a lot of stuff which is inherently IT these days, gene sequencing, CT scans, etc., there's a lot that computers add which humans can't do ourselves — even video consultation (let alone remote surgery) with experts from a different hospital, which does involve a human, that human can't be everywhere at once: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telehealth
> Nothing critical / life-or-death / personal injury should rely on Windows / IT systems.
If you think that's bad, you may want to ensure you're seated before reading this about the UK nuclear deterrent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_Command_System
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So they might get sued on a local level?
Many companies paying lip service to quality/reliability but internal incentives almost always go against maintenance and quality of service work (and instead reward new projects, features e. t. c.).
Of course it would. Restaurants are held liable for food poisoning, but they still operate just fine. They just - y’know - take care that they don’t poison their customers.
If computer systems were held liable, software would be a lot more expensive. There would be less of it. And it would also be better.
I think I can get behind that future.
Write me software that coordinates all flights to and from airports, capturing all edge-cases, that's bug free. Then tell me the number you estimate and the number of years to roll this out.
The right way to write code like that is to start simple and small - we're going to service airports X, Y and Z. Those airports handle Q planes per day. The software will be used by (this user group) and have (some set of responsibilities). The software engineers will work with the teams on the ground during and after deployment to make sure the software is fit for purpose. Someone will sign off on using it and trusting its decisions. And lets also do a risk assessment where we lay out all the ways defects in the software could cost money and lives, so we can figure out how risk averse we need to be.
Give me scope like that, and sure - I'll put a team together to write that code. It'll be expensive, but not impossible. And once its working well, I'd happily roll it out to more airports in a controlled and predictable manner.
That isn't an easy thing to do, but it should be possible.
There is no 'AI', that is always only hype. There is machine learning, which is a very powerful technology but I doubt MSFT will be leading that revolution. As for LLMs, MSFT might have some competitiveness there but I doubt it's going to be a very lucrative market. MSFT is highly overvalued.
I agree with you on the technical aspect, but the distinction makes regular people eyes glaze over within 5 seconds of that explanation. AI as a label for this is here to stay the same way cyber stopped meaning text sex of IRC. The people have spoken.
<< MSFT is highly overvalued.
Yes, but so is NVDA, the entire stock exchange and US real estate market. We are obviously due for a major correction and have been for a while. As in, I actually moved stuff around in my 401k to soften the blow in that event 2 years ago now. edit: yes, I am a little miffed I missed out on that ride.
So far, everything was done to prevent hard crash and in the election year, that is unlikely to change. Now after the election, that is another story altogether.
<< I doubt MSFT will be leading that revolution.
I think I agree. I remain mildly hopeful that the open model approach is the way.
Agree. First half of 2025 could be pretty spectacular (if/when we get through 2024).
I suspect there might be some pretty radical plans for US debt monetisation being drawn up, to be implemented early in the new presidential term.
You should stop trying to predict the next crash. According to the study, most people (including institutional investors) consistently believe there is a >10% chance the market will crash in the next 6 months when historically the probability is only 1%
Hmm? No. I will attempt to secure my own financial interest.
<< According to the study, most people (including institutional investors) consistently believe there is a >10% chance the market will crash in the next 6 months when historically the probability is only 1%
Historically is doing a fair amount of work here. I would argue there is little historical value to the data we face. Over the past few decades we went through through several mini revolutions ( industrial, information and whatever they end up calling now ) in terms of how we work, eat, communicate and, well, live.
All of these have upended how humans interact with the world effectively changing the calculus on the data that preceding it if not nullifying it altogether in some ways.
Your argument is to stop worrying since you are likely wrong anyway, by a factor of 10. I am saying is 1935 people also thought they have time to ride the wave.
edit: ok, need coffee. too many edits
We don't have a good idea how to make software that is flawless, at least, not at scale for a cost that is acceptable. This is changing a little bit now with the drive by governments to use memory-safe languages, but that only covers a small part of the possible spectrum of bugs in software and hardware.
In this case it seems most of the software which is failing is dull back office stuff running on Windows - billing systems, train signage, baggage handling - which no one thought was critical, and there's no way on earth we could afford to rewrite it in the same way as we do aircraft systems.
Point of sale in a records store, less important. Point of sale in a pharmacy, could be problematic. Web shop customer call center, less important. Emergency services call center, could be problematic.
So if you develop your compression library it can't be used by anyone running critical infra unless you stamp it "critical certified", which in turn will make you liable for some quality issues with your software.
That's very realistic and already happens by requiring certain standards from the resulting product. For example, there are security standards and auditing requirements for medical systems, payment systems, cars, planes, etc.
Outside of regulated industries it's the context in which software is used which determines how critical it is. (As you say.)
So what you seem to be suggesting (effectively) is that use of software be regulated to a greater/lesser extent for all industries... and that just seems completely unworkable.
In physical world, you can specify a tolerance of 0.0005 in but the part is going to cost $25k a piece. It is trivially easy to specify tolerance, very hard to engineer a whole system that doesn't blow the cost and impossible to fund.
Great software architectures are the ones that operate cheaply, but are bulletproof when software fails. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering
Boeing disagrees.
We're talking about critical software. If we can't afford to reach the level of safety needed because it's too expensive, well so be it.
Besides, the enormously expensive flight systems don't seem to make my plane ticket expensive at all...
What failed today is a bunch of Windows stuff, of which there is a vast amount of software produced by huge numbers of companies, all of very variable quality and age.
Now, that it was not known previously to be critical, that may be. Whether we should have realised its criticality or not, is debatable. But going forward we should learn something from this. So maybe think more about cascading failures and classify more things as critical.
I have to wonder how the failure of billing and baggage handling has resulted in 911 being inoperative. I think maybe there's more to it than you mention here.
It's also common to rollout changes regionally to prevent global impact.
To me it seems Crowdstrike does not have a very good release process.
Here's something I don't understand: those jobs pay chump change compared to places like FB and (afaik) social networks don't have the same life-or-death context