It's reported that New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) wants to pre-approve new software releases by ride companies like Lyft and Uber. Since the TLC is well-known to be heavily staffed with software experts, what can be bad about this idea? Other than just about everything, that is?
The proposal
Here's what they're saying:
Uber and Lyft have to buy smartphones and give them to the TLC because the Commission runs such a tight budget that there's no way it could afford the required thousands of dollars. Oh, wait ... the planned 2015 revenue of the TLC is projected to be $545.6 million, with expenses of $61,045,000. That leaves just $480 million or so, which is undoubtedly already committed to something or other, which is probably terribly important.
Let's assume it happens. How is it going to work? Uber gives a release to the TLC, which takes exactly how long to test it how rigorously by what means? By the time it gets around to organizing to test one release, another will have arrived. So the pressure will immediately come to have fewer, larger releases. Then will come the time when the TLC approves a release and there's a bug. There will be commissions, reviews, and a big operation will be set up to implement industry best-practices, government-style. Things will get even slower and longer, and government tentacles will start weaving their way into Uber's software development organization. In the end, New York will end up getting a small number of releases, way after the rest of the world has them, buggier than everyone else, and the costs will be passed on to the drivers and riders.
Why?
Right. Sure.
The Reality
Governments can't build software that works in any reasonable time. See this.
No matter how hard they tried, software testing in the lab just doesn't work. See this.
They will press to have fewer releases, when more frequent releases are the key to good software quality. See this.
Finally, most important of all, we don't need to be protected, thank you very much. If it doesn't work, people will stop using it, and the company will either fix its problems or go out of business. That's the way the greatest wealth-creating and poverty-eliminating system ever invented works.
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