Those of you with Sony Playstation 3 (PS3) systems can now once again use your system. As I had reported in my blog post Monday morning, the Sony PS3 was bricked(when technology is rendered completely inoperable by a system crash or bug) by what Sony confirmed to be a leap year bug where at midnight on February 28,2010 the system clock updated to February 29,2010. Because 2010 is not a leap year there should be no February 29th. This bug prevented users from using their PS3 system at all - even if they don’t use the system online.

The problem stems from a pre year-2000 based method of calculating valid leap years. There is a nice description of the problem if you CLICK HERE that is not too technical.

Some users of the PS3 are being extremely critical of Sony with statements such as “They should fire the programmers!” and “We should get free games for the inconvenience!” The users don’t realize that Sony did everything that can be expected of a responsible manufacturer in that situation: They quickly acknowledged the problem, they communicated when resolution was expected, they advised users what to do in the meantime, and ultimately delivered the solution within the promised time frame.

Though this bug happened in a gaming platform, there are some important lessons to be learned from it that apply to our business users:

• Even high tech devices (like the state of the art PS3) can be effected by Y2k glitches
• An application can never be tested too much
• No matter how thoroughly an application is tested, glitches can and will occur
• When bugs do arise in our systems, we need to measure the developers more on the timeliness of their communication and resolution, not in the fact that a bug was allowed to occur

-Paul
***
Paul LaFlamme
President & CEO
Centrend, Inc.
508-347-9550 x115