Whirlpool - case study of why it's not a good idea to buy software from a company which doesn't understand software

Why is that? Well let’s look at my oven .

This is my oven. My oven is always about 5 hours off the correct time.

Why is this?

Is it because I am too dumb to alter the time on my oven?

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Well okay, I admit I might not be the sharpest tool in the box but I do in fact understand how to alter the time on my oven. Believe it or not.

The issue is that I live in Toronto and we are Eastern time zone and when my oven disconnects from the internet it get’s set back to Greenich Mean Time - or GMT time. Which is fives hours off my time zone. Since my internet is unreliable in my neighbourhood, this happens a lot and I have given up on correcting my time.

I did ring Whirlpool about the problem who helpfully explained the problem to me. The rep didn’t have a solution for my problem. He did kindly offer to sell me an enhanced support contract which would have been a good solution for increasing Whirlpool’s revenue but it didn’t appear to be a good solution for my problem.

So I politely declined his kind offer.

So if Whirlpool really understood software they would understand that one of the challenges with software is that with great power comes great responsibility. Software makes it easier to make richer more functional products, but it also means you can ship software with more bugs. Which means that companies which put software into their products need to have a sound update strategy.

Now an oven is a relatively harmless device to have a software glitch in. But what about a car? Currently there is only one company on the planet that I would have a reasonable level of trust to manage the software in my car.

This company is Tesla Motors. This is because Tesla understand software as part of their DNA and they have thought about how to upgrade their software.