31–40 of 132 posts
In terms of time, they have a policy of permission vs. forgiveness. You need to be prepared to fail early – but that’s okay! If a prototype takes less than two days, don’t worry: just go ahead and do it. It if takes more... you should probably have permission.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For large companies with a valuable reputation, that's almost guaranteed to be true. Most people won't generate a million dollars worth of value in a given year, but nearly everyone could do that amount of damage to their company's reputation in just a few minutes.
Sure, yes, if e.g. the customers' health or safety was at risk. But I don't think the average bug in a web app would damage a company's reputation significantly. GMail occasionally shows me a message saying "Oops, an error occurred." It doesn't make me think any less of Google.
Look at some of the major Web2.0 kerfuffles in recent years. Off the top of my head, I can think of:
- The HD/DVD mutiny on Digg
- Public suicides on both JoelOnSoftware and Justin.TV
- Reddit storing passwords in cleartext and them getting stolen off a laptop
- Ariel Waldman and the Twitter harassment fiasco
- The Flickr censorship debate here: http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/40074/page3/
Yeah, you could argue that those services are all still around, so obviously they haven't been hurt too much. How much management time was wasted in dealing with them? How many non-users decided not to become users because of something they heard 3rd-hand about how it's a terrible company?
(And I don't think the solution is to never innovate. I can understand why a middle manager at a big company would think so, though - a PR disaster is by definition public and disastrous. In the short run, it always makes more sense to not mess with success, it's just that this doesn't lead to success in the long run.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
S3 is a really bad example because they provide infrastructure. Their customers actually see their entire site go down. Those kinds of companies are the exception. I hope Heroku has rigorous testing and scrutinizes every change, even though they are a startup. Let's say I own a video site and I want to add threaded comments. If I have 5 users and the site goes down for 5 minutes, those 5 users will get 5 minutes each…
I used an infrastructure site as an example because the value proposition is easy to understand when you use a site that has a clear and simple monetization strategy. Video sharing sites are arguably an even worse example than S3, because the value of uptime is so hard to perceive or compute. It's likely that even Twitter doesn't understand the true value of a customer-hour of Twitter uptime, because the site isn't m…
I agree with both of you that it varies considerably based on what the site does (infrastructure, videos, games, etc).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used an infrastructure site as an example because the value proposition is easy to understand when you use a site that has a clear and simple monetization strategy. Video sharing sites are arguably an even worse example than S3, because the value of uptime is so hard to perceive or compute. It's likely that even Twitter doesn't understand the true value of a customer-hour of Twitter uptime, because the site isn't m…
But I think what Dustin is saying (correct me if I'm wrong) is that the multiplier applies both ways. And that the total cost of making a 5 minute downtime mistake, even to a million users, could easily be outweighed by the benefits of releasing a product/feature/site 2 weeks early. In most cases, I think large companies are risk adverse instead of risk neutral to situations like this. I agree with both of you that i…
I'm not going to argue with that. Just because a certain increase of caution is rational doesn't mean that caution isn't being overapplied in many cases, just as PG suggests in his original post.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, yes, if e.g. the customers' health or safety was at risk. But I don't think the average bug in a web app would damage a company's reputation significantly. GMail occasionally shows me a message saying "Oops, an error occurred." It doesn't make me think any less of Google.
You aren't a typical non-early-adopter user. I've had people make loud, public complaints about such trivial matters as a new logo being too tall, or a text box being too wide, or an optional WYSIWYG editor feature ruining the "text-only flavor of the community". These on websites far smaller than GMail. Look at some of the major Web2.0 kerfuffles in recent years. Off the top of my head, I can think of: - The HD/DVD…