Why send out non-working Lollipop?

[AC Question]

I "upgraded" my Nexus-5 with Lollipop, which promptly destroyed my ability to use the screen. Sending the phone to LG, the "fix" was to remove Lollipop and go back to what it was before. What's Google's point??? LG's failure???

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! What kind of screen issue did you have? Individual devices might have problems with an update for various reasons, like a corrupt download or an error in the update installation. I doubt that Google is intentionally sending out a non-working update.

 

[Rukbat]

The way it used to work (back in the stone ages) was that Marketing asked Engineering for a release date. They were told "when it's ready", They pushed and got "the more you waste our time asking, the longer it's going to take". Since the most important thing to the company (not just Google - almost any good software shop) was a program you'd be glad to sigh your name to, the executive offices sided with Engineering.

Nowadays, the executives are most concerned with how much their stock sells for (because a lot of their pay is stock options), and the stockholders don't care whether the product works, they care whether the company sends them big dividends. So Marketing tells Engineering when thy're releasing the software, whether that's a reasonable date or a totally insane one. They release it on that date. (Unless, as TMobile had to do about a week ago, the bugs are just so bad that they can't release it.) Engineering doesn't even get to say "I told you so", they just get blamed for the bugs - even the ones they hadn't tested for yet, because that wasn't supposed to be done until 3 months after Marketing's release date.

Since most consumers are sheep (the "Oh, well, what can you do" or the "It must be something I'm doing wrong - these things are getting too complicated" attitudes that most people have), it's cheaper to send out bugs and bad hardware, and spend a few bucks fixing the things the few tech-literate consumers complain about. (If you'll notice, 5.0 had a memory leak - which is a BIG no-no in an operating system. Did they come out with a fix and call it 5.0.1? No, they added features and called it 5.0.1 - and it still had the memory leak. So did 5.02 - but it had more features. People want the sizzle, not the hamburger - McDonalds proved that decades ago.)

WE have to make the change. We have to send back every phone that doesn't work (especially where you get an in-warranty phone replaced, and the bad one goes back to the manufacturer) so it gets so expensive for them to keep sending us garbage that it's cheaper for them to spend the money on building good phones and writing good software. (It's why shareware is often better than its paid equivalent. Microsoft releases when it'll make them the most money. Joe "works out of his garage" Programmer wouldn't put his mane on a pile of bugs - he gets it working first, then releases it. [Compaq changed the way DOS worked - in just a tiny way. One of the first shareware programs I wrote wouldn't run properly on Compaq DOS. I hated them for not publicizing the change and making me look incompetent. That my program didn't work was my fault - I wrote it. These days? "Oh, we'll get to that bug when we're told to" - which might be never. Windows 98 still has bugs. Look as some of the excuses on some pages on the Play Store when someone complains that an app doesn't work. Not "We'll look into that right away", but "try this" or "it works here" or some other non-answer. It's why I sing the praises of good companies here - there are so few of them. Maybe if "make a better product" increased profits, there would be more of them.)