LR 1.3.1 Slideshow Playback problem - real world example of how software bugs affect your business

Question

MacBook Pro 17" latest brand new laptop
Apple 10.4.11
LR latest 1.3.1
This post is about a playback bug in the slideshow module introduced in LR 1.3.1 and how it publicly affected my business reputation last night.
I shoot high end weddings here in Los Angeles. I charge my clients a lot of money and deliver a fabulous bespoke photography service with custom designed albums that come in at several grand each as well as the cost of the shoot itself.
Nearly all my work comes from referrals and part of my selling point is my personal style, which is all about a super professional approach, no excuses, get the job done, done right, and exceed all expectations for my clients. So no technical problems are allowed ever. I carry triplicate cameras, drives, laptops, lights etc. Everything is checked and double checked.
Lightroom has changed the way we do things in my business and has shaved many hours per week off our editor's work load. It has been awesome for us.
I am a big fan and think that LR will be seen in history as a critical moment when digital photography came of age. Just wanted to say this before I get into this next bit.
But Adobe - listen up...really listen up...we just updated LR to 1.3.1 from 1.3
Last night your application embarrassed and humiliated me in front of many hundreds of people.
I usually do a projected slide show during the wedding reception using camera jpgs from the earlier part of the day. These very popular with the guests and are good for our business. Last night my partner pulled a fabulous show together and with much fanfare we projected as usual onto a huge white wall with hundreds of people watching.
Just like we have been doing since LR 1.0 - we select 50 or so images, make a collection, tailor the settings so the images look fabulous when projected, go to the slide show module and hit play. It has always worked incredibly well, very clean, easy and painless. Wonderful.
But last night the show played only the first few slides before it went back to the beginning. We quickly rebooted, first turning off the projector, and redid the same step. This time it played a little further and randomly started playing back. So we took it all off line again and rebooted it all.
SAME SH*T again.
The bride's parents (my clients in this case) came over and were very condescending to me about our "broken and unreliable equipment". We had a huge hall of guests watching this. I could have crawled under a table.
We now exported the images as JPGS (off line with no projector of course) and then ran the slide show from these using the Apple Preview application. But this took us another 20 mins.
But by now we had lost the moment, the wedding planner had moved on to other things. We lost the opportunity to be slick, professional and impress the venue, the other vendors, the 3 other bridesmaids who are looking for wedding photographers etc etc. And I had publicly messed up for my client on the most important day of his daughter's life.
This slidehow problem is a stupid and repeatable bug and Adobe you have no excuse for releasing substandard product like this to professional users like me.
You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Will Henshall
323.333.9833

Answer 1

Many thanks to those above who spent the time to reply to my post/rant...
Ironically, these particular clients are actually typical model customers for us, and we have a fabulous relationship with them. They were understanding about the software problem and they then loved our work when they saw it. So all good there in the end. The comments made were somewhat jokey and not intended as malicious. But many a true word is spoken in jest...
However, my point is that the quality, level of service my company provides in this competitive market is at a level where there can be no room for amateur like error. Especially with something as simple as getting a slide show to work. Like a swan serenely gliding down a river, covering a big budget event has to look effortless from above even though underneath that swan is paddling like hell!!!!
Lightroom is all about workflow, that's what it is amazing at and the simplicity of pulling the camera jpgs out from the Canon 1dn bodies 2nd card and importing them into this single application, running our custom presets on them and then simply hitting the slideshow button has been a joy to behold. No need to export, no need for another application, just really simple and quick. Adobe really got the principle of this right.
As a photographer, I truly don't want me or my partners to be hunched over a laptop fiddling with imperfect software at a job when what will further my career and feed my family is me going back out to the event, shooting more killer images and networking networking networking for future gigs. Client relations, thats the name of the game here.
So here's the rest of my rant/point:
If you think about professional software like any other kind of professional product made by the leading public company in its market - compare it to say my Ford truck. I bought my truck new, it is reliable and every time I start it to go to work, it gets me there. It has never broken down in 100,000 miles. Even when I take it in for a service, the parking brake still works in exactly the same way that it did before I took it in - ie as advertised. I do not need to test whether my truck works ok when it comes back from a service, and this is a reasonable assumption I think. I can park it on a hill with no worries.
So what is different with software? Why are we, the end users expected to put up with below standard shoddy tools, especially when provided by huge multi-million dollar companies like Adobe?
When the software is "serviced" ie updated, my expectation is that it will be made BETTER, or at least the key user features should still work as advertised. The first thing I *don't* think is, uh-huh, this a new release, hope the parking brake still works. I am making a living as a photographer, not a software tester.
There is a culture of software users expecting that there will be bugs. And this is not acceptable to me. Not at all. Software is just a product that does specific things just like any other my truck, my cameras, my lights etc.
I am sick sick sick of using professional grade software that some production manager has signed off on, knowing or not caring that there are significant bugs that will hit a key number of users.
And yes perhaps I should mention I also have a previous career in software development and yes I truly understand what is involved in releasing innovative products like this.
Don said above It is an iron law of software development--especially with innovative new applications in their early development. Lightroom fits that pattern to a tee. Buyer beware!
This absolutely is not an iron law. If you have ever used most Avid or Digidesign products you will know that as long as the machine specific conditions have been adhered to, then the product will indeed work as advertised. Its about quality control and someone in the developing company driving the development production with integrity and care.
Rock solid software development is generally about cost to trim the budget you can either cut time to market or trim the feature set or allow a higher acceptable failure rate (ie how many bugs are in the code) and Lightroom is one of the most important apps to appear since Photoshop itself.
Someone somewhere at Adobe needs a kick in the pants to get the quality of this up to where it needs to be. Get more testers on it, fire the qa manger, do whatever you have to do, but remember your radical and awesome application is now right on the bottom line mission critical workflow for many of us. And that is how you are positioning it when you sold it to us in the first place.
As I hope you can tell when reading this, I am indeed a fan of LR. A big one. I have converted dozens of my colleagues to use LR. It rocks for most things, even with its weird flawed odd orange color cast for some skin tones under some lighting conditions. It does stuff that no other app does.
I was just very very disappointed with this slide show bug.
Please Adobe LR folk, focus on this and get it fixed asap, and then keep an eye on the quality of your future releases. The use case for the slide show messing up on my particular machine running a super low number of images from small size jpgs on a recent Mac OS must have been very much on the left of your Gant chart...
Will Henshall