When Web Services Go Bad

Much has been made of the new wave of web services, where a hosted application fulfills the needs of numerous users. When it goes wrong, though, the efficiency of the distributed system plummets. report from Silicon.com, Salesforce apologized for the problem, and noted they have greater than 99 percent uptime. Some customers cited in the article disagreed, claiming monthly outages of an hour or longer occur regularly. The problem comes down to infrastructure. A business has to have multiple instances of its web service available, lots of redundancy, to be able to stand behind claims of reliability. Without that redundancy, web services can and do go away, especially as more users crowd into the system. Six Apart had that problem recently with its Typepad blogging service, a problem that persisted for months. Web services may offer alternatives to PC-based applications, but until they reach a point of reliability greater than 99 percent, Microsoft doesn't have any reason to worry about its desktop businesses, especially Office. Email the author Del.icio.us") |