Well, as they saw, any publicity, even the bad kind, is good publicity. It's a shame Coke's IT team failed so badly in that department. It's like they threw away millions of advertising dollars because they couldn't keep the site up or make it work. Epic fail right here.
No question it's a failure. But if it resulted in increased sales, that's a silver lining.
For that matter, maybe it's not a failure. Successful retailers -- like Apple -- often have insufficient inventory to meet demand. It gives their products additional cachet by making them temporarily rare. Could the same strategy work with websites, by throttling the number of people who can access, while the rest get error messages?
There are solutions, but they always have their limits. And it is not possible to think of every possible scenarios before they occur. As you said "internet technologies are still fairly fragile things" so are many other human endeavors.
The problem is that humans will always make mistakes whether they are using the most advanced technology or not. The IT or the marketing departments may be blamed for what happened, but does this really matter now if the message that the company wants to put accross reach the targeted audience? Maybe it does. But what really matters now is how quick an adequate solution is found after the failure.
Everything boils down to sales, true. But it would still be considered as the failure of the IT department (if they were involved) or the marketing department (if they outsourced it to a vendor without giving them load estimates).
It seems like it should be surprising that web hosting still can't handle unexpectedly large amounts of traffic... but internet technologies are still fairly fragile things.
With all the DDOS attacks, tho, it just seems like there should be solutions that are reliable when it comes to high traffic websites...
I think it will be enough blame to go around. I would imagine that an adequate load test of the application would be paid dividends for both the hosted provider and Coke. I wouldn't be suprised if it was a budget decision to skimp on load testing and ensuring adequate infrastructure to handle 10 - 15 million concurrent users.
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