Instead, what really occurred was a lesson in the everyday risks that can come with free-wheeling corporate blogging.
Here’s what was posted to the Google Chrome Releases blog on Friday by program manager Mark Larsen:
“We were not able to issue a Dev channel release this week. Our test team did a great job in qualifying two Stable updates and a Beta update this week, and we just didn’t have the bandwidth to push a Dev channel release. We’ll get an update out early next week. Stay tuned for some exciting new features we hope to land in the Dev channel.”
Which prompted a ZDNet blogger to write:
“It sounds like there isn’t going to be a dev channel release of Chrome this week – simply because they’ve already updated the stable, and beta channels this week, and simply can’t do any more because they ran out of bandwidth. … You wouldn’t think bandwidth at Google would be an issue, but it sounds like it can be.”
An industry analyst sent me the ZDNet link yesterday, noting: “I thought this was pretty funny — Google running out of bandwidth.”
By which time the Google-sucked-up-all-its-bandwidth report already had been picked up by this blogger and this one and this one … and this one that appears to be informing a presumably thunderstruck Chinese audience … and, I believe, this one, although I don’t speak the language.
One can only imagine the fallout were such a Google bandwidth crisis actually true: Service providers would be rushing out press releases touting the depletion as proof positive of the need for bandwidth caps. A congressman might smell a headline opportunity. Heck, Wall Street might wonder if the recession has hamstrung Google’s R&D. … Bailout?
But, alas, the facts once again get in the way of a great story:
Google’s Larsen updated the blog post yesterday:
[Edit, 11 May 2009: Change ‘bandwidth’ to ‘test capacity’. Sometimes the colloquial jargon we use at work translates imprecisely for a public audience.]
Ah, test capacity; colloquial “bandwidth,” not real bandwidth. Well, it’s still kind of interesting to learn that even at Google — $129-billion-dollar market cap Google — resources remain finite.
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