Wednesday, January 7, 2009

When technology crashes 2.0

Was scheduled to participate in a webinar this past evening. Went to the site early to log in as is my practice. I had used this service before on the MAC with no issues across the multiple browsers.

As I logged in and waited, waited, waited and waited some more, a curious message appeared: "Your computer appears to be off line." Weird since I could navigate within other tabs on the browser. How does an online meeting service return a message that you appear off line? Reminded me of HAL in 2001: "Don what are you doing, Don?"

I went to the service site and attempted to log into the session and again, no no. Clicked on support and received this message: "This service is not available. Please try again later." The service was overloaded by the volume of participants and crashed. This is a well known and well-marketed service.

End users remember these difficulties. Hopefully, the sponsor has learned some lessons about scalability across its service provider and the consequences of heavily marketing a session.

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