Will the Lady Gaga incident affect confidence in cloud services?
Yes, I'll admit it, Lady Gaga is one of my guilty pleasures. Her new album, Born This Way, was made available on Amazon for a one-day promotional price of 99 cents, fans went crazy, and Amazon's download time slowed to a crawl. Huge and unexpected volumes of traffic will naturally cause some slowdown, but it seems not everybody was understanding. Consumers tend to be very unforgiving. We want what we want, and we want it now. How does this incident and others like it affect how consumers will see cloud-based services and Internet commerce in general? It seems that consumers have come to accept Internet-based commerce, but will a handful of overloads push people back into the record stores?
Answers
The Lady Gaga-inspired outage at Amazon will probably have no long-term, lasting implications. The demand for Lady Gaga’s music was so high that Amazon offered the same 99 cent deal for a second day without incident, as they were better prepared the second time around. As more businesses move into the cloud services marketplace, there will likely be many more “learning opportunities” for those businesses to come to a better understanding of how important it is to have enough bandwidth to handle a spike in consumption. This single incident won’t affect Amazon because they’re so big and have so many customers, they would have to make a bigger mistake in judgment than this single failure.
- Share this answer
- Permalink
Related Questions
A reader asks: I am currently using IE 6.0 on Windows 2000 Pro and am not planning to upgrade the operating system. Which free browser...
I am a developer of android applications. I want to develop applications about new technologies like DLNA etc. So that user can get...
Now that we have had a chance to measure the after-effects of Google's most recent update to its algorithm, how has it affected your...
VoIP has gone from a geeky curiosity to an essential part of business. Today VoIP is a big-money business, and like telephony itself,...
In provisioning a small office with fewer than 10 employees, is there any advantage in deploying a T1 line rather than business-class...
Hi JOiseau,
I doubt it will make any difference whatsoever. Sometimes companies just underestimate demand in a situation like that. And Lady Gaga does have a large following, I suspect that Amazon just didn't understand the ramifications of being involved with Gaga's legions of followers.
I bet they consider things much more carefully next time they do a promotion like that. Sometimes the burned hand teaches best and all that.