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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Social media has been with us for a decade -- but employer policies and the law are anything but firm about the most appropriate usage of this powerful tool.
Businesses often struggle to decide which domain to use. When it comes to purchasing a domain name, you have plenty of extensions to choose from, ranging from .com and .net, to .me, and even .mobi. But which one should you pick?
I've been writing about how the next evolution of the Internet might just be an advertising revolution, and how corporate IT can stay involved as the enablers and providers of the technologies that make this possible.
In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
