Comments on: Downtime Doesn’t Matter

By: Wolfe

Wolfe — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:17:44 +0000

I might argue that code is protected by engineering practice which makes sure it is not totally and utterly worthless. Design is not guarded by such principles and often design efforts have a negative production value without anyone understanding the situation until it shows up as bad business.

By: slab

slab — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:52:48 +0000

Yep. The network effect is the same reason I keep my LJ account around– I could go set up something on my website, but then I don’t get the ‘friends list’ stuff quite so easily.

By: Ben Wilhelm

Ben Wilhelm — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:19:09 +0000

I think it’s also worth considering the skinner-box aspect, where people end up more addicted to something with unpredictable results. I think there may actually be a factor that downtime helps a service grow – both because people don’t have as much time to get sick of broken features, and because people find themselves thinking “ooh, I wonder if it’s on now, if it is I better use it, I might not get a chance later!”

And on top of that, with any system that has strong network effects – like WoW, like Twitter – you’d much, much rather have twice as many people online at a time for half as much uptime.