Slashdot pointed a few weeks ago to an article about how LISP gave
a competitive advantage to Viaweb, which provided turnkey Internet
storefronts. This software is now running Yahoo! Stores. The article
is by Paul Graham, who co-developed the software with Robert Morris
(yes, the Internet Worm guy).
Such fast turnaround on bug fixes put us into an impossibly tempting
position. If we could catch and fix a bug while the user was still on
the phone, it was very tempting for us to give the user the impression
that they were imagining it. And so we sometimes (to their delight)
had the customer support people tell the user to just try logging
in again and see if they still had the problem. And of course when
the user logged back in they'd get the newly released version of
the software with the bug fixed, and everything would work fine.
I realize this was a bit sneaky of us, but it was also a lot of fun.
http://www.paulgraham.com/paulgraham/avg.html
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