The Age Of Good Enough Technologies: Redundancy Getting Distributed To The Edge
from the five-9's-is-so-20th-century dept
Following the Skype outage last week and the big SF data center outage last month, Business Week is exploring the fact that today's technology is often at the "good enough" level, rather than being designed to withstand a nuclear attack. We've certainly had previous examples of this as well. What may be more interesting, however, is that people are basically creating their own redundancies, rather than leaving it up to the service providers. In other words, redundancy is getting decentralized. Rather than making sure that a service provider can keep mission critical services up at all times, we're all learning to create our own personal backup plans. In the article, it discusses how Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim basically "backed up" his Skype phone account with his mobile phone. This is true in other areas as well. I have a DSL connection at home, but if it goes down (all too often, unfortunately) I have both an EV-DO account and a (in those really desperate times) dialup account. My email is available at a web-based service... but also downloaded to a local client. In other words, knowing that many of these services are really only "good enough" I (and many others) have simply started creating out own backup system for mission critical services. Of course, many of these redundancies offer additional features and benefits, but it's certainly distributed the "general uptime" responsibility out to the end-users rather than the central service providers.
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Filed Under: redundancy
Companies: skype
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I'm glad that the overall distribution of backup options has been pushed towards the end user because personally I prefer to handle my own data.
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I do agree with personal backups though. External hard drives are great for this.
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Costs of redundancy
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Re: Costs of redundancy
a neighbor to get cable, and the other get
DSL or EV-DO or Wifi, and then setup a MAC
address list limited encrypted WiFi link
between the two of you.
You both pay the same as you do now, but
can use the other as backup.
You just need someone within line of sight
of a decent grid or yagi antenna.
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$ for redundancy
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Please use a spell checker! Typos - in Articles.
I hate when big commercial sites have typos in their headlines. Can't they use a spell checker?
I laugh when newspapers have typos in their headlines. Surely, they have heard of the "Computer" and the "Internet" (Everyone now knows the Internet is "a series of tubes!").
Perhaps they might use the modern technology - the spell-checker, before they go out of business as the people
who can read get annoyed that newspaper editors can't!
PS. Mike, I love Techdirt and many of your articles are spot on! You rarely have typos! You accurately and tritely describe many crazy situations in the world.
Who knows - maybe Ron Paul will get elected -
he seems honest and consistant! The US will improve when the gov corruption is reduced.
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-Maybe for the customer but not for Best Buy.
Most customers don't come in because they CAN'T fix it/back it up/whatever, they come in and pay for the convienience of having someone else do it.
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Before the computer age, this level of quality would put a company out of business the minute a decent competitor showed up.
Early on, Netscape released all its browsers as "beta", until the next version came out - as beta. They openly admitted to the "good enough" philosophy. We all bought in.
Everyone knows that MS never gets a release right until about SP2. We all bought in, and stay in.
Now even "do no evil" Google releases their products as beta. They are usually free, but the "it's beta, use it at your own risk" disclaimer covers them.
I'm sorry, but it's all just an excuse to take your money for crap. Since the market goes along with it, you can be sure someone will be glad to do business on that basis.
No software I ever produced went out as beta or in "just good enough" condition. Beta is for testing - period.
Now that I work in IT for a manufacturing company, I'm proud that our products are buit to a high level of quality. It even helps us in the marketplace.
I bet the ISPs mentioned in the article guaranteed or at least advertised 99.999% uptime.
I wish we would start demanding that we receive what we pay for. It is not too much to ask.
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