I’ve been thinking a lot about scaling and the economics of the cloud recently after reading this. Specifically, this quote: The costs for most SaaS products tend to find economies of scale early. If you are just selling software, distribution is essentially free, and you can support millions of users after the initial development. But…
Read More Scale and scalabilityReading the Institute for Government’s report on Universal Credit, I was struck by two related things. First of all, the project was powered forward by people who didn’t bear any responsibility for its implementation. Whenever it ran into people who needed to care about how it would work, it hit opposition. Lord Freud’s original skunkworks…
Read More Universal Credit: the history of an IT project failureHere’s the crash report Amazon Web Services issued after the massive outage to their US-EAST region, the first and biggest of the regions, back in 2012. Here’s the one Heroku issued about their outage, caused by the Amazon outage. On Saturday night, Barclays Bank had a major outage which took out online authorisation for credit…
Read More Barclays should publish its internal report on the outage this weekendShorter me: economists should study business more, and in an ideal world, industrial sociology, before they try to do cognitive psychology Peter Dorman at Econospeak takes issue with a Robert Frank piece about workplace safety, which has all the whoopee doo Econ-101 problems you’d expect. I think, though, that there is a really big issue…
Read More This one weird trick will improve your productivity and deliver social justiceSo, reading the LSE Growth Commission report. There’s the usual stuff about infrastructure, and they want both an infrastructure bank and an infrastructure planning commission (I remember that!) and crappy provision for small and medium-sized firms’ financing needs, hence a KFW-analogue. So far, so radical consensus. There’s also a weird fetish for academies; apparently we…
Read More Our economic future: Other.Remember that thumbsucker I did on the Great Firewall? Well, here’s some data, via this post (thanks, Jamie). It seems that Fang Binxing, China’s Chief Bellhead, boss of the Beijing University of Post & Telecoms, and king of the great firewall, really is in trouble due to his special relationship with Bo Xilai. He briefly…
Read More not at all defangedQuietly, the Eurofighter project seems to be running into trouble. First of all, Dassault got the Indian contract and the Indians claim that Rafale is dramatically cheaper. Further, they weren’t impressed by the amount of stuff that is planned to come in future upgrades, whose delivery is still not certain. These upgrades are becoming a…
Read More slow-motion procurement failureSo, why did we get here? Back in the mists of time, in the US Bell System, there used to be something called a Business Office, by contrast to a Central Office (i.e. what we call a BT Local Exchange in the UK), whose features and functions were set down in numerous Bell System Practice…
Read More The politics of call centres, part two: sources of failureWhat is it that makes call centres so uniquely awful as social institutions? This is something I’ve often touched on at Telco 2.0, and also something that’s been unusually salient in my life recently – I moved house, and therefore had to interact with getting on for a dozen of the things, several repeatedly. (Vodafone…
Read More The politics of call centres, part oneThe fact that a majority of this year’s graduates from USAF basic pilot training are assigned to drone squadrons has got quite a bit of play in the blogosphere. Here, via Jamie Kenny, John Robb (who may still be burying money for fear of Obama or may not) argues that the reason they still do…
Read More The RQ-170 hack and the drone bubble