Assault and Betary

Apparently, Google’s use of the Beta tag isn’t keeping it out of a lawsuit:

In a frivolous lawsuit that ranks right up there with people suing McDonald’s for burning themselves drinking hot coffee, a woman is suing Google because she claims Google Maps directions led her to a highway, where she was struck by a car.

Sure, the lawsuit probably won’t go anywhere. But Google’s going to have to spend precious coin responding to the papers and whatnot. If the lawsuit gets some traction, Google’s going to have to settle or whatnot.

Keep that in mind whenever your organization pushes something “quick and dirty” live, or when it takes shortcuts with the initial development and promises to fix the shortcomings, bugs, and oversights with later release which will be under the same sort of pressure and process for the new features as was the initial development (that is, the new features are slapped on barely tested and with no bug fixing or revisiting clunky workflow), or when it hides behind a “beta” tag hoping that only smart users will use the application according to the happy path but that might find users are not as clever at sussing out the happy path as are the dev team.

You’re buying a Daily Pick 5 ticket with that philosophy. Sure, your number probably won’t come up, but you’re playing the drawing every day, and if it comes up, you’re going to lose enough to make you wish you had done things a little differently every day.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 1:14 am by The Director and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Assault and Betary”

  1. jstrazzere Says:
    July 12th, 2010 at 11:10 am

    (sigh)

    Google apparently needs to add the “SafeForStupids” filter to Google Maps.

    I use GMail every day. If I respond to my favorite Nigerian scam artist, will I be able to sue Google for the losses I incur?

  2. The Director Says:
    July 12th, 2010 at 11:47 am

    There’s one way to find out, but just to be cautious, you might want to wait to see if Google settles.

    Although with e-mail, it might fall under that ruling that ISPs don’t have control over the content that passes through them.