Australian Dept. Store Chain's Website Crashes and Can't Get Back Up 156
McGruber writes "Myer, Australia's largest department store chain, has closed its website 'until further notice' at the height of the post-Christmas (and Australian summer) sales season. The website crashed on Christmas Day and has been down ever since. This means Myer will see no benefit for those days from booming domestic online sales, which were tipped to hit $344 million across the retail sector on Boxing Day alone. Teams from IBM and Myer's information technology division were 'working furiously' to fix the problem."
Cost center only? (Score:5, Insightful)
Another company that sees its IT department as a cost center only and not a part of the company responsible for bringing in revenue?
Now, perhaps, its management will have another thought about that, but probably not -- probably they are thinking about assigning blame and who should get fired.
IBM not immune to webbie disease (Score:5, Insightful)
Those "stupid software glitches" that you mention are the natural outcome of webbies doing what webbies do best, which is to be utterly and hopelessly clueless --- it's a result of not actually understanding how computers work under the hood. (Many are just content editors who informally picked up some PHP or Java). IBM is not immune to webbies causing chaos, because it's a disease that is endemic throughout the web industry.
You've pinpointed the problem very well by exclusion. As a rule, hardware, O/S and database developers and sysadmins are pretty skilled and experienced. Webbies on the other hand make an amoeba look intellectual, and it seems that at Myer they've succeeded at exhibiting their skills to perfection.
Once you'd ended up with a team of webbies, there is no fix short of disbanding the whole unit because webbie team managers and interviewers never hire anyone more clueful than themselves. It seems that Myer has acquired a pretty bad infestation.
Re:IBM not immune to webbie disease (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's pretend it's Healthcare.gov (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Meyer's is doomed. It's imploding and will fail.
2. They should have never tried to do have a post Christmas online sale in the first place. It was always going to fail.
3. The website failure is 100% conclusive evidence that post Christmas online sales are wrong.
4. The people who came up with the idea are evil and want to destroy their customers, but the website failure saved people from ruin. Now they need to heed the warning and make sure that Meyers fails to protect themselves in the future.
5. Even thought other commercial websites are working (just like some state run healthcare sites) all post Christmas web sites are just as intrinsically evil and bad for users and they should all be dismantled before they ruin everything.
All these, and all the other criticisms of Healthcare.gov, all sound really crazy when applied to this similar situation, don't they? This might be a clue that this kind of hysterical reaction is equally foolish when applied to the Healthcare.gov rollout problems.
Note how much hysterical reaction this receives and you can see the full process unfolds in miniature.
Re:Cost center only? (Score:5, Insightful)
Would be the best thing to do with Fosters.
Re:Surprised at IBM... (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM believed it could cut every corner and go the cheap labor route and nobody would notice while their profits soared. They are wrong.
Re:Let's pretend it's Healthcare.gov (Score:5, Insightful)
So here's a going commercial entity, clearly not a government, and they have had a huge website failure at a critical time. So let's apply the same "logic" that has been used to slam Obamacare and the Healthcare.gov website.
...
All these, and all the other criticisms of Healthcare.gov, all sound really crazy when applied to this similar situation, don't they? This might be a clue that this kind of hysterical reaction is equally foolish when applied to the Healthcare.gov rollout problems.
Unless you add a "6: Picked the wrong contractor for other than technical reasons".
Then the situations are pretty much identical.
Re:IBM not immune to webbie disease (Score:4, Insightful)
What is worse is that those clueless people have cratered the market for people that actually know what they are doing. I have had customers try to outsource something, fail but then come back and try to negotiate a price in the ballpark of what they outsourced the project for even though the outsourced project did not work. They try to argue that they at least have a ballpark estimate to work from. Even had one customer turn off the ordering system on their site that tied into the inventory tracking system because the new system was just about to go online ... that was about 3 years ago and the new system never did get online at all.
That is a major reason I went back to school to change fields. Well that and how do you get something more exciting than DNA editing to cure diseases?
IBM cut numbers savagely in Oz (Score:5, Insightful)