Cuil and MobileMe, two online SaaS services that struggled to get out of the gates the past few days and weeks. Both experienced different types of problems, but they were both very visible problems for their respective companies. First, Cuil. I blogged yesterday that Cuil was returning some odd results, paring James Mitchell Ashley's old picture with some of my content. Well it turns out that if you just kept searching a bit more, you'd start to see even wackier results that just didn't make any sense. A search engine that doesn't produce accurate results won't last long once people have 1, 2 or 3 bad experiences and go back to whatever they were doing before.
Cuil's problem wasn't that they didn't anticipate the traffic to their site (which they didn't.) They chose to do a full product launch rather than a soft launch, or Google-style beta. Microsoft's taken that lessen to heart and the folks at Cuil would do well to do the same.
The Apple MobileMe product meltdown was even worse. Apple tried to launch MobileMe, convert existing users, roll out updated iPhone 2.0 software, and provide MobileMe as a paid service. Hmm... Big mistake. Apple even had to resort to putting up a MobileMe - Status page to keep everyone informed of Apple's progress to try and get the service up and running.
The lesson in all this is that rolling out SaaS products isn't the same as traditional software, just as designing SaaS for multi-tenancy and scalability is much different than designing on premise software. Flash cuts don't cut it with SaaS software. Building in only marginal extra capacity doesn't cut it either. One Digg and it could seem like the whole Internet is doing a "student body left" shift right on top of our product launch.
If you're moving down the path towards a SaaS or S+S offering, take some lessons from those before you. You could avoid repeating a lot of the same mistakes.
Like this? Here are some of Mitchell's recent posts.
Another Cuil Search Engine On The Block
Microsoft Cloud Initiative Announcement Looming
Podcast/Video: Xobni & Co-Founder Matt Brezina
Is Live Search Making Headway Against Google?
Live Mesh Sighting For Macs
S+S: The Kobayashi Maru of Microsoft
Product Reviews:
Microsoft Live Mesh Google App Engine
LiveNewsCameras.com Xobni Outlook pluginRecent Converging Network Blog Posts:
Get Ready For XaaS Everywhere
Unbelievably Bad Web Password Security
Back From Hiatus, Saved by Web 2.0 Technology
It Takes a Village.. ah, actually, being there first and tons of hard workFavorite Book Recommendations:
The Big Switch
Zero Day Attack
Clear BloggingCheck out Mitchell's
Converging On Microsoft Podcast. Current Podcast Episode: Security Mike Gets Serious About SecurityAlso visit Mitchell's personal blog The Converging Network and SSAATY Security Podcast.
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Mitchell Ashley is principal consultant at Converging Network LLC where he provides product, technology and social media consulting to emerging technology companies. A successful CTO and product innovator, Mitchell has created many successful, award winning products in the networking, security, convergence, Internet and IT industries. In addition to blogging for NetworkWorld, Mitchell regularly blogs at TheConvergingNetwork and co-hosts the widely popular StillSecure After All These Years podcast.
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The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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