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I think a common error is taking this view in isolation on each bug.

Fact is, if you ship enough 'low probability' bugs in your product, your probabilities still add up to a point where many customers are going to hit several of them.

I've used plenty of products that suffer from 'death by a thousands cuts'. Are the bugs I hit "ship blockers"? No. Do I hit enough of them that the product sucks and I don't want to use it? Absolutely.




Very much this, and low risk bugs compound at scale.

If you're in a very large FANNG type company, and say you have 1000 components that each ship 1 bug each day that has a 0.1% chance of breaking something critical, that translates to a less than 50% chance you ship a working OS on any given day. And that may mean the entire company's productivity is impacted for the day depending on how broken it is.


Software is commonly built on non-fungible components and monopolies.

Right, you don't want to use Microsoft Word, or SalesForce, or Apple vs Android, or X Whatever. It's highly unlikely you'll have a choice if you use it though.




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