Why mobile application can be a deciding factor

I work at appdynamics (www.appdynamics.com) which is into application performance management domain. People who do not know about appdynamics, it is a product which can track a business transaction in a complex distributed application and give you a real time picture of how the system is working. It can detect anomalies and diagnose a problem in the application which is great for any modern day complex web application.

Now in a system problem do not happen everyday. It happens once in a while and to detect and find out the root cause for it one need to monitor the application at all times. That means having a crystal clear and logical "User Interface" which should be easily accessible from anywhere. And it is this monitoring capability which is going to be a deciding factor at many sites as more and more vendors develop the technology to monitor the next generation applications. Having your dashboard accessible by a web browser is great but not enough. A heavy UI (like the one of appdynamics) will not be that useful with smartphones and tablets. The OPs guys who are responsible to have the app run without any down time should be enabled to not only monitor but also diagnose a problem in the app via their smart phones or tablets and i think this is becoming more and more important.

So my advise to all next generation APM vendors is to develop the mobile app for their UI as soon as they can. This could be a deciding factor in winning or loosing a deal as bigger and bigger enterprises move to the disruptive change you have brought in this space. 

Payment page, where absolutely nothing should ever fail.

These days clouds are all over us and they are pouring money down. From simple business applications to all kind of storage, everyone wants to do it on cloud. Since i had been storing all my personal data so far on my hard disk which is a disaster waiting to happen, i decided to move all my personal contents like pictures taken in last ten years to cloud. I looked around and the cheapest one i got was from microsoft skydrive.com.
They give 7GB of storage for free and you can get additional 20 GB for $10 per year which is fairly cheap. I had close to 23GB of data to store so i decided to buy their subscription and started filling my credit card information. Now this is the place where nothing and absolutely nothing should fail since this is the bread and butter, and microsoft's product failed measurably, not because of any technical glitch but because of utter stupidity of developer and tester of the product.

Below is the screen shot for their page where they ask for credit card info. They ask for credit card number and CVV on the back of the card. My card's CVV number starts with 0 (e.g. 051) which i honestly filled in the box and clicked the next box.

Now the developer converted this number (051) to absolute integer automatically (which is 51) and bingo i get an error that the CVV number is too short

This is a failure which will cost money to microsoft every minute it exists on their page. What is the point of making a product and maintaining it when the very purpose of making money out of it is hampered buy a stupid bug (i want to call it incompetence and negligence). I am sure many like me would have faced this issue so far and i am sure that so far it must have cost hundred of thousands of dollars if not millions to microsoft.