Monday, June 25, 2012

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.

3 comments:

raghu said...

update on this
I sent the blog's link to skydrive's team and since then they have fixed this bug on their system,

digital certificates said...

A special thanks for this informative post. I definitely learned new stuff here I wasn't aware of !

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