rule of business #47: use what you are selling (unless it sucks)

Why is it that every time Apple releases a new product their site goes down? I realize that they must have an enormous spike in traffic, but it should be completely predictable and can’t be near the kind of traffic Yahoo get’s on an average day.

While I’m picking on Apple, at last Apple expo, when Steve released the supercomputer in a 8″ by 8″ box (excluding the enourmous external power supply never shown in the media), the streaming video broadcast using QuickTime was crap. Through barely audible audio and nothing but still frames of video every 10 seconds (even on a fast DSL connection), I could barely make out Steve bragging about how he was being broadcast live to the world with QuickTime and Akamai.

Knowing I could do better, went to ZDnet.com and watched the exact same broadcast in glorious smooth full-screen streaming video using Windows Media Player.

Style + Shitty Products = Stylish Shitty Products.

Akamai, which claims to be “delivering a better internet” by mirroring popular content on their ‘bleeding-edge’ servers, seems to be a lot of non-sense to me. Sure, I don’t know what I’m talking about, but here is my anecdotal evidence: Two sites I know use Akamai, Apple.com and CNN.com. Apple.com crashes with traffic spikes and the streaming video feels like 1996. CNN.com has the worst video offerings of any significant website (in fairness to Akamai, this is partly do to poor encoding of video and audio).