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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Duke of URL© who wrote (85926)	7/18/1999 3:02:00 PM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Duke of URL, great song from my youth, (spelled Earl, right?). Good article in the San Jose Mercury news business section today by Dan Gillmor about online companies' reliability. He makes the point, and I agree with him, that online brokers and auction sites have their priorities far more into increasing subscribers than they do on reliability (RAS). People running the servers and networks at places like Etrade and eBay are probably like strangers in paradise, having little clue about things like hot backup systems. Great opportunity for companies like IBM, Unisys, Sun, or Intel to move right in with a great RAS story. For Intel, this, of course, would be a sales call from the division that contains the new server farm group. sjmercury.com Posted at 2:30 p.m. PDT Saturday, July 17, 1999 Online reliability will carry a price BY DAN GILLMOR Mercury News Technology Columnist SO you've moved all your stock trading to the Internet, where you can pay a minuscule commission when you buy or sell any number of shares at any price. Or you spend hours buying and selling things in online auctions. And then it happens. Or, rather, it doesn't. You want to make a quick stock trade on an especially busy day in the equities markets, and your online brokerage doesn't respond to your Web browser. Or you were planning to peddle or bid on something cool at the auction site, and all you get is a message saying there are technical difficulties and please be patient. You're outraged at these online companies. You should grow up. This is life in the Information Age, at least the early stages. Once you do grow up, get mad -- but do it productively. Do business with companies that treat you right, but expect to pay a little more for the privilege. Now, I am emphatically not defending the technology companies' attitude or behavior when it comes to the reliability of their products. The industry is one of the most profitable on Earth, and it has done some marvelous things for us in the past few years, but its attitude toward reliability and customer service has been scandalous. The usual excuse is that everything is buggy, and to some extent it's true. But this reasoning has gone way over the line. The appliances we use at home do not crash. They work. We would never buy a TV that forced us to reboot the set once a month, let alone once a week or every other day. Congress would hold hang-'em-high hearings if the telephone system worked as well -- I should say as badly -- as the average Internet service provider. Yet the networks operating in the background of TV broadcasting and phone systems are massively complex. They've also been around for a while. The flakiness of wireless telephones isn't so much about bad software as inadequate coverage: all those dead zones where the signal disappears because the phone isn't close enough to a tower. The wireless-phone industry's relative youth accounts for some of this, but so does its zeal for gaining the biggest possible customer base and worrying about serving those customers later. Those of us who use cell phones put up with this for at least two reasons. First, the convenience makes up for the unreliability, to a point. Second, we know we can pick up a phone at home or the office or in a pay-phone booth and make a call that won't drop out. The land-line phone system is the ultimate backup when we really need to complete the call. Customer mass Building a critical mass of customers or users is even more important on the Net. For an auction site like eBay, more bidders means more listings, which attracts more bidders and yet more listings and so on. I have to believe that eBay has cared more about adding customers than ensuring reliability in its systems. If that assertion isn't true, then eBay has been incompetent. In their defense, eBay and the other mass-consumer Web companies are operating in a new environment. The Internet is a marvelous network of networks, connecting millions of computers worldwide in a way that defies systemwide failure. Like any chain, however, weak links become obvious -- because they break. Some computers work reliably when subjected to massive stress. Some companies have backup systems that go on instantly when primary systems break down. Some of the top Internet commerce companies are subjecting systems to almost unprecedented levels of stress. A reason is not the same thing as an excuse. But the same thing applies to customers who expect something for nothing. Free-lunchers And some American consumers qualify as the biggest bunch of free-lunchers around. They're the ones who love the idea of buying and selling stocks for an incredibly low price compared with an old-line brokerage. They just don't want to consider the possibility that low prices can mean not-so-great service. They want to visit an auction site that has absolutely everything in the world for sale. They scream when everyone else on the Net has the same idea and collective desire proves too much for the site's computers and software. The complaining is interesting, given the surprising acceptance by most personal-computer users of unreliable PCs and software. Why are the ``early adopters' of e-commerce so vocal about Web-site failures when they're so passive about the lousy quality of the hardware and software they use to get on the Web? Maybe the Net itself, a great communications medium, is part of the explanation: It's easier to be heard when you're connected to others than when you're operating a stand-alone PC. And maybe we're just inured to PC travails. In the end, consumer-oriented Internet commerce companies will do a better job when consumers demand it. But asking for better quality isn't enough. People have to patronize the companies that provide quality, and have to be willing to pay more. Will you? Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday, Tuesday and Friday. Visit Dan's Web page (www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/columns/gillmor). E-mail: dgillmor@sjmercury.com; phone (408) 920-5016; fax (408) 920-5917. PGP fingerprint: FE68 46C9 80C9 BC6E 3DD0 BE57 AD49 1487 CEDC 5C14.