Comments:
I wonder if this has more to do with habit than reliability. I was thinking this week about how much we still relying on flying people to and fro and how even large companies still don’t use teleconferencing and other high-tech communications tools. Many of these tools work perfectly well, but the business world can be very resistant to change sometimes.
Compare Enterprise 2.0 tools to large, robust systems such as SAP or Oracle. E2.0 tools certainly have their place, but to compare them with bigger systems, in terms of reliability, just makes no sense. As an example, if you are in the hospital and the doctor needs to call a specialist for advice. Do you want that doctor using Skype, or would it be better for him to use a real phone?
I do agree that habit may play a role, however, there are real differences between consumer tools and heavy-duty infrastructure.
Michael Krigsman
http://projectfailures.com
That’s a good point, Michael. There are some “Web 2.0” tools that work great for consumers or even small businesses (especially considering their price point), that just aren’t viable enterprise solutions.
On the other hand, I think Skype should be held accountable more for how they handled the outage (not very well, from all accounts) than for the fact that it happened. I can remember more than one day of screaming clients when I worked at an ISP and AT&T or SBC screwed up our dedicated lines. Large-scale infrastructure is far from flawless, performance-wise.