At some point in business school a painful course comes along that teaches all kinds of complex equations about the marginal cost of too much inventory, not enough inventory, something called E-O-Q, something else called J-I-T, and (if you were a humanities major, like me) a lot of M-O-U-S-E as well.
Once you learn all that, of course, you then step into a real job and learn something else: There are situations in which you simply do not run out of inventory. In other words, the marginal cost of running out—of either a product or service--is pain and suffering beyond all measure.
A few weeks ago I was asked to help coordinate the Mother’s Day breakfast at church, customarily hosted by our teen group. That put me in Costco on the Saturday afternoon before Mother’s Day with a grocery list and critical decisions about how many eggs, bagels and honeydew melons to buy. Not knowing anything about breakfast metrics (1.25 eggs/person?), my simple rule of thumb: Just Don’t Run Out. Costco was delighted, I’m sure. But nothing could bring about more pain and suffering than a mother without breakfast on Mother’s Day.
A friend of mine worked for a company where senior management asked the sales force to describe its worst competitive situation. The reply: Sales could deal with any circumstance except one where a customer desperately needed product and it had none to deliver. That would open a door to competitors that could not be easily closed. In short: Just Don’t Run Out.
Yesterday, Google’s Internet search went down (or went slow, depending on your location). For only about an hour--that’s it. And only about 14% of its users were affected. But that was enough.
Now, I don’t know anything about keeping Google’s search engine up, but I assume it is one heck of a dynamic environment. And from experience, Google is almost always up when I need it, and works beautifully.
But a single hour and a 14% impact gets the Wall Street Journal to wonder out loud if such an event will “only add to concerns about the reliability of computing services delivered over the internet.” Yikes. That really goes to the heart of Google’s strategy against Microsoft, and the whole "cloud" movement.
The lesson for Internet search (and Internet email, for that matter) is simple: Just Don’t Run Out. Even for an hour. Even for 14% of your customers. Forget the E-O-Q and the J-I-T and whatever passes for those equations in the cloud. Just focus on the pain and suffering.
Being without search for an hour is not as bad as running out of scrambled eggs on Mother’s Day, but in all honesty, it’s pretty damn close.
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