Dev error bricked 600 PCs, caused $1M CD-ROM write-off
In the previous year, they flubbed the job because the program didn't always install itself on some PCs running Windows 95 or Windows ME machines system due to registry corruption.
Key points
- "We wanted to increase our successful installation metrics, so in conjunction with the installation team, a key decision was made – by me – to force the updating of registry keys to enable the install," Oriel admitted.
- If the developers could find such a machine, the plan was to roll it back to the restore point, verify everything was in order before the customer installed the update, install the accounting software, and figure out the problem.
- This customer was located a few hours away by road, so an engineer got the job of visiting on the morning of the holiday to pick up the stricken machine, give the customer a shiny new system and configure it to their specifications.
The next day, Oriel and his colleagues got to work and found a fix, then created a version of the accounting application that wouldn't break any more PCs.
This story comes from a time when software shipped on CD-ROMs and users bought it off the shelf in actual shops.
Additional details
- Oriel was, of course, summoned into a meeting with senior execs to explain the situation and watched as they decided the best course of action was to pull buggy CDs from stores – which meant trashing CDs and packaging valued at $1 million.
- In his email to The Register, he asked the portentous question: "What could possibly go wrong?" What went wrong was that not long after the software was shipped, the vendor's support lines started getting calls from customers who complained that after installing the accounting package none of their other software would work.
- "In the week prior to the holiday, we replaced over 600 machines," Oriel told The Register.
- The company tasked its support agents with finding a customer willing to surrender their PC, which proved difficult because few bothered to create a registry restore point.
- "To get a reproduction case we need a user's machine where the user had created a Windows Registry restore point prior to installing our application," Oriel explained.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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