MapQuest vs. New York…
I was perusing eBay earlier this evening when I came across a listing selling 102 acres of land in New York for somewhere in the financial vicinity of $60,000. Out of curiosity, I clicked the Display Map link which generally opens up a map of the parcel, or the town or at least something nearby so that I could get a general idea of its location. Too late, I noticed that the street address and the city fields hadn’t been filled in by the seller, and I expected a generic MapQuest map of the state.
Instead, I was presented with a map of the 48 contiguous states, minus both coasts and half of Texas, with a caption above that read “The State you provided could not be found. The map is centered on the Country.”
Not only does MapQuest have an issue with San Francisco, now they have spurned the entire state of New York. Or perhaps they know something we don’t. Was New York repossessed by Big George the Repo Man for being delinquent in paying their federal taxes? Has the state been vaporized in a nuclear assault by Middle Eastern terrorists? Was Hillary Clinton not satisfied with just stealing the contents of the White House and decided to steal the state of New York instead? Was New Jersey so upset about owning only half of Ellis Island that they sent a few boys from Trenton to “rough up” New York?
No. Unfortunately, it’s just another example of the lack of thorough QA processes exhibited (or NOT exhibited) by today’s “high-tech” companies. With industry-leading mega-corporations like Microsoft setting poor examples by shipping defective products with tens of thousands of known bugs, they are paving the way, not for success, but for decreased productivity, dissatisfied customers and eventual failure. The new software paradigm is that causing an error when choosing “New York” instead of “NY” is the consumer’s fault. Thinking outside the box of the flawed software package is now a violation of license agreements. Trade one set of assets (long-term customers) for another (liquid).
I long for the future days of Star Trek, not just for the technologies behind the matter transporter or the food replicator, but for the flawless operating system on the onboard computer systems. In the 24th century and beyond, the Blue Screen of Death was something only experienced by those crew members subject to the red-suit syndrome. When was the last time you saw Scotty forced to reboot the ship’s computer because Spock received an unrecoverable fault while attempting to interface with a Klingon ship?
Quality first, folks!
