How Long Till Our Services Become Commodities
by Ewan Spence
This seems to be the season for web services to go down. We’re in the middle of a US Blackberry outage, the popular Web 2.0 service Twitter lost 12 hours midweek (but did humorously promise to have super strength when it returned) and it’s not been long since Skype went down for a few days. And until these events stop becoming ‘expected’ because they’re internet services, they won’t be viewed as must haves by the general public.
As messaging evolves, our services for IM, VoIP and internet connectivity are going to become more and more vital to our connected lives. Outages such as the above in our favorite services are not going to be acceptable if they gain traction in the mass market, and that’s going to be the big challenge for the companies; scaling up not just in terms of users, but in terms of 9s in reliability. One day down out of thirty might be fine for the Web 2.0 crowd, but it’s not going to be acceptable out with them.
Or to spin it around, would you sign up to a mobile network that had the same reliability as Twitter?
Designing a robust system is one that naturally is going to be a challenge, and rightly left to the end of any development and adoption cycle. There are unique problems that need to be solved, and a solid source of revenue or finance needs to be in place before it can be implemented. Making the jump from success to a commodity is one of those problems any company would like to have. Let’s see who manages to get there in the next few years before we heap too much praise on the still in beta services.
