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Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

arstechnica.com

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Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#41

Post by timeshifter »

lifeguard wrote: post #20
timeshifter wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you choose to throw out an insult at Windows? Is there anything about this story that points to Windows being at fault? How about you think before you flame next time, okay?

I have been a professional webmaster since 1995. I have worked for California's largest privately held webhosting company. I am an MCP in Windows server and have been the only guy on staff willing to support customers with IIS. I base my statement partly on that experience.

If you want to make a thread for insulting Windows, go right ahead. It has absolutely no place in this thread, which was about people failing, not any specific technology. People can fail with Apache just as badly as they can fail with IIS.

I'm a web developer who's made his career working with IIS. I think you know where I'm going to tell you to shove your insults.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#42

Post by timeshifter »

njharman wrote: post #15
WrkInProgress wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you determine using Windows was a mistake from the information presented in the article ?

"Using Windows was a mistake" is a truism. Also, from the article, project failed. Failure is regularly equated with having made mistakes.

> "Using Windows was a mistake" is a truism.

No. No, it is not.

> Failure is regularly equated with having made mistakes.

And what mistake did Windows make here? Keep the baseless insults inside your head, please.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#43

Post by ams6110 »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #27

>To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm. Lawsuit incoming in 3...2...1... I can't imagine the billionaires who funded the campaign and the various Super PACs are going to be pleased to find out Romney likely lost because of a failed GOTV effort.

It's a stretch to think that a functioning mobile app on election day would have made the difference between Romney winning and losing. The election wasn't really that close. And I say that as someone who voted for him.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#44

Post by rayiner »

smacktoward wrote: post #3

Orca had been conceived by two men—Romney's Director of Voter Contact Dan Centinello and the campaign's Political Director Rich Beeson... To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm. This sounds like a lot of failed IT projects in large corporations -- dreamed up by upper management types who don't know anything about tech, then farmed out to consultants and tech…

A cynic would say that this is just the software consulting version of what management consultants like Romney do.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#45

Post by [deleted] »

mrdodge wrote: post #12
meepmorp wrote: post #9

Zero training? A single web server? No end users even touching the system till it's time for mission critical use? No frigging redirect of http->https? And it looks like, as has happened more than once in my professional life, people outside of the management structure saw possible risks and were blown off by those in charge. Even if you supported Romney, this has to give you some pause about the man's management ski…

He hired Microsoft and what sounds like a Microsoft Partner. No one gets fired for buying Microsoft.

[deleted]

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#46

Post by cube13 »

lifeguard wrote: post #23
WrkInProgress wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you determine using Windows was a mistake from the information presented in the article ?

A: ungraceful crash under load

Which also can happen with a terribly coded application running on Linux. Or with a terribly configured apache server.

This was a meatspace failure, more than anything else.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#47

Post by outside1234 »

lifeguard wrote: post #6
eli wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Web App is actually the right call. It was for volunteers doing GOTV in the field, not as much for people sitting at a desktop. And you would want to be able to issue updates quickly and carefully control access -- things that are much more difficult with an App Store app.

Using Windows was a mistake, that's for sure. Good thing for Democrats they didn't know about the open source ushahidi platform.

You can fail on any platform with bad implementation and/or bad management and/or bad planning. That's the lesson here.

(and at Twitter when they fail whaled for months on end with Rails - it wasn't Rails fault - it was the application of Rails in too high a volume deployment)

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#48

Post by waterlesscloud »

aneth4 wrote: post #40
smacktoward wrote: post #3

Orca had been conceived by two men—Romney's Director of Voter Contact Dan Centinello and the campaign's Political Director Rich Beeson... To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm. This sounds like a lot of failed IT projects in large corporations -- dreamed up by upper management types who don't know anything about tech, then farmed out to consultants and tech…

Indeed. Particularly in contract to the Obama machine, which was built by passionate technologies motivated mostly to help Obama win, not make money.

Interestingly, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said they built something similar in 2008, and it crashed too.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/messina-obama-won-on-the-...

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#49

Post by mnicole »

acslater00 wrote: post #29
meepmorp wrote: post #9

Zero training? A single web server? No end users even touching the system till it's time for mission critical use? No frigging redirect of http->https? And it looks like, as has happened more than once in my professional life, people outside of the management structure saw possible risks and were blown off by those in charge. Even if you supported Romney, this has to give you some pause about the man's management ski…

It would give me more pause if Mitt Romney were involved personally in this sort of a project.

It all trickles down, right?

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#50

Post by emmelaich »

brudgers wrote: post #22
lifeguard wrote: post #5

The campaign could not manage launching a web app and they wanted to run the entire USA !?!?!?!

Heck, I remember a Republican candidate who was amazed by the scanner at the supermarket checkout.

You remember a report. Or a report of a report. The reporter wasn't even there.

http://www.snopes.com/history/american/bushscan.asp

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