The "Our Servers Crashed" Launch/JV Technique?

[o_brient]

Originally Posted by Paul Myers

Mike,You are not wrong there.

Jeff gets a kick out of the people who think this is some kind of marketing ploy.


Paul

Right one and all.

My credentials - I've been in IT 20 years now and have been the following:
An Analyst/Programmer
A Software Engineer
A Senior Software Engineer
A Technical Architect and now my day job is
A Trainer in Business Process Modelling leveraging my IT skills (Love a paid captive audience - the only possible server failover is if my knees give out from an over-indulgence the night before)

My "night/weekend" job is unfolding...

Let's put the record straight on this one.

To my knowledge, Jeff Walker, Frank Kern, Mike Filsaime, John Reese, Rich Schefren and a whole who's who of Internet marketing - including the living legend that is Paul Myers DON'T know about the complexities of a fully
Reliable
Available
Scalable
Performant
Usable
Extensible
Redundant
Clustered
(And I could go on and on...)
computing infrastructure.

They rely on others for the "techie" details and each has their own computing infrastructure delivering their own businesses.

This is no problem.

As Will Rogers said (one of my favourite quotes) "We're all ignorant - only on different subjects".

They don't have to know about how to setup a LAMP system, how to put their computing needs into the Amazon Cloud using EC2/S3 or having a full on in your face clustered environment using multiple firewalls, having a DMZ or creating multiple layers to separate presentation, business or database logic.

If the aforementioned makes no sense to you then GOOD, it doesn't to the guru's either.

Why should it?

At the end of the day there are different shades of people around the world. I'm not being racist, I'm being a "scrupalist" [sic].

Some people adopt "black hat" strategies.
Some people adopt "grey hat" strategies.
Some people adopt "white hat" strategies.

White, grey/gray (case in point), black are colours/colors (case in point) which look different depending upon perspective.

Servers will go down, that is a fact.

Some people will engineer server failures to be able to report their "tsunami moment" as Jeff Walker puts it (he does not advocate doing this btw as if you do it will come back to bite you on the ASSets you thought you had) - that is a fact.

Some people will be unfortunate even if they think they have setup a system which should in theory cater for a massive influx of demand (for example, and I kid you not this is based on real world experience - a major company kept experiencing repeated outages every Friday evening after hours, long story short - a cleaner needed a hoovering point and their servers did not have an uninterruptible power supply - you guessed it, the cleaner unplugged the nearest computer/server to do their job).

You cannot legislate for everything and you can be damn sure no matter what you do there will be some detractor or other flinging guano in from the sidelines.

In fact, let's face it, many's the time such guano slinging is intentionally provoked to ellicit a response (not saying this is the case...)

Rant off.

My first name is Thomas/Tom so I sure know how to doubt but given my experience I also know you have a choice.

Believe the marketer in question or don't.

Move along regardless.