This letter / 01
Build for the equipment people already own
A familiar retail label concealed a hardware revision that mattered to software. Compatibility needed evidence about the device, with the right technical owners retaining approval.
The package carried a familiar model name. So did the devices on the bench. Eight of those devices nevertheless fell outside the hardware assumptions under which the package had been prepared. The discrepancy was not obscure once the relevant revision was examined. It had been obscured by the convenience of a retail label that several teams used for different purposes. The same name helped a customer recognise the product, a showroom colleague find its range and an engineer describe a software package. We had allowed that shared vocabulary to imply a shared technical identity.
