I got the same email just half an hour ago. I'm glad to see they've finally got their PR act together!
I wonder if this will turn out to have been done by a Christian Right group, by LOLsters, by an over-zealous employee, or truly and sincerely by accident?
In my ideal world, Amazon would offer it's products to people in foreign countries on an all or none basis. Which would be foisting the American value of freedom of the press on foreign countries. I don't have a problem with that.
In your ideal world, have the US embargos on Cuba, Iran, or North Korea made life any better for the ordinary inhabitants of those countries? Did UN sanctions on Iraq help folks live healthier, happier lives? Because in the real world, this kind of blanket ban usually makes things worse, not better.
I'm a software developer dealing with large databases (actually, very large), and the impression I got was indeed bad design leading to bad coding... for which, as a developer, I have some sympathetic tolerance.
I also think that Sy's invoking the "incompetence rather than malice" approach works and can be softened a bit to include a more likely "it got too big too fast to work under the original design", and they just didn't work fast enough to catch up.
Some developers are (ahem) both eminently competent and sympathetic to users, and we still manage to piss them off regularly. The best software has defects. The trick is to find most of them before the users get their fingers on it. Any development cycle that is less than 40% testing is going to fail that trick.
I think that phrase about not ascribing to malice what can be explained by incompetence applies here... which is the sense I'd got from reading some of the threads in the developers forums. That Amazon's backend was broken in some very bad ways.
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That's one of the reasons it's embarrassing and hamfisted.
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I wonder if this will turn out to have been done by a Christian Right group, by LOLsters, by an over-zealous employee, or truly and sincerely by accident?
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Sean
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I also think that Sy's invoking the "incompetence rather than malice" approach works and can be softened a bit to include a more likely "it got too big too fast to work under the original design", and they just didn't work fast enough to catch up.
Some developers are (ahem) both eminently competent and sympathetic to users, and we still manage to piss them off regularly. The best software has defects. The trick is to find most of them before the users get their fingers on it. Any development cycle that is less than 40% testing is going to fail that trick.
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Apparently some troll tried to take credit also.
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