Technology as a scapegoat for bad business choices
March 13th, 2011 at 4:36 pm ETFrom today’s NYT Real Estate section:
A few months ago, Michael Bolla gave up his independent brokerage, Luxury Lofts & Homes, to join Prudential Douglas Elliman because he was about to handle some large developments and was not willing to invest the money to upgrade the servers for his Web site to handle the increased volume in his listings.
“If you have a 120-unit development on a small guy’s Web site,” Mr. Bolla said, “it will crash.”
Um, excuse me? For $50 a month, Pair Networks (for instance) will give you 240 monthly gigabytes of transfer on a redundant network that I bet you is more reliable than whatever Prudential Douglas Elliman is using. You can sign up with Pair online right now, and it’ll be ready for you in an hour! And capacity and reliability in the marketplace scale up very quickly from there, much faster than cost.
If the brokerage you’re about to list your house with runs its own servers,you’ve picked the wrong broker — they’re spending money on in-house infrastructure they should be spending on marketing your house.
I’m not surprised to hear people blaming their business decisions on technology, but I am surprised to see the Times passing it along unevaluated, even in a vanity story about New York real estate.
It reminds me of this gem, which I see every time I log into AT&T’s website:
Excuse me? My “connection speed” has nothing to do with why I’m sitting here waiting for your (apparently) underdesigned, underpowered authentication infrastructure to log me in. Didn’t your granny teach you not to lie?
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Rich Mintz blogs on online fundraising and social media, American history and culture, bicycling and urbanism, food, technology, and other topics. Professionally, he's an expert in fundraising, constituency development, and social media for nonprofits, cultural organizations, cause-related marketers, and corporations. He is based in New York, where he serves as Vice President, Strategy, for 
March 26th, 2011 at 3:45 pm
[...] I’m not talking about this ridiculous coffeemaker you can talk to… but apropos of this example of AT&T’s website giving you a gibberish (and inaccurately to boot) message about why [...]
March 26th, 2011 at 3:54 pm
Hilarious, Rich. “Depending on your Internet connection speed” is such a ubiquitous excuse, I’ve never placed much thought into it. But now that you bring it up, I’ll be extra peeved every time I see this passive-agressive phrase.
May 10th, 2011 at 9:30 am
Include modifiers or verbs, where necessary, after a comma. For example: saddle, leather saddle, adjusting height.