Online commerce and Mrs. Gibbs

摘要

In the decade that the Internet has become a central feature of our culture, online commerce has gone from pipe dream through experimental service to mainstream business. The effect on the average consumer has been profound. Take my wife: Just a scant five years ago Mrs. Gibbs thought that computers were just another thing to dust. She now has become proficient at navigating the Web and a dab hand at eBay auctions. But when the services she uses behave erratically, she is tost. Us old hands know what bad online application performance looks like. We know — at least roughly — what an error means even when it is a ridiculously general message such as "unexpected error"