quote:Originally posted by scifibum: The problem, I think, with assuming it was deliberate is that there is no apparent reason to suspect Amazon (by which I mean any representative chunk of its management) would have thought this was a good business decision.
Right. I think this was a bad call by someone lower down on the food chain.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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Even better, Simon Bradshaw's blog talks about the fact that one coding error causing this massive problem is an indication that Amazon's structure may open them up to more problems in the future.
quote:I don't think for a second this was an evil reactionary plot by Amazon to purge itself of LGBT publications or to appease the Religious Right. Whilst that, if true, would have been very bad for Amazon's reputation, I think the actual explanation may in the long run be even worse. If it turns out that such an embarrassing incident could have arisen from a single coding error, and that Amazon's infrastructure allowed the error to pass undetected, propagate around the world and then take days to fix, then it rather makes the world's best-known online ordering brand look like a massive house of cards. At the very least, it will be an object lesson both in scalability of architectures and in corporate image management in the age of Twitter.
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I think "coding error" is slightly misleading. It was a cataloging error - it was misapplied metadata.
I think "house of cards" is rather overstating the case. What it indicates is that Amazon apparently does not have strict process controls for all metadata changes, and that in some cases important application logic hinges on that metadata. I really doubt there are many cases other than "adult" categorization where anything as important as inclusion in general search hinges on the category, and you can bet that Amazon is implementing the missing process controls now.
I suppose this could relate to scalability, in that it shows that you shouldn't have ALL of the following: -uncontrolled metadata management -important application functionality tied to metadata -be really big
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