The Guardian reports that Apple cannot comply with an order to update a notice on its web site regarding its patent dispute with Samsung. The judge wants changes in 48 hours. Apple claims that it will need 14 days.

While I guess that this is mostly due to the need for PR and Legal to work something out, and perhaps a little stalling, I know more than a few companies that struggle to get even the smallest change through their release cycle in less than a month. Non-techies are always, like the judge here, incredulous when they hear this.

IT groups can expect the same reaction from their customers within the business. “This is a small change, why does it take so long?” The question is more than fair. We really should be able to get a tiny change out of development, through regression tests, and deployed into production very quickly. Some companies are capable of deploying small changes to production within a few hours of change. While that’s faster than appropriate for many applications, particularly those in regulated environments, we can learn from them. Good automated test suites are important. And dependable, self-service deployments are critical to a smooth flow of code out the door.