The Perils of Platform Selection

摘要

The subject of Web site platforms and architectures is one that is of compelling importance to some site managers and excruciatingly boring to others. This is partly because when a platform truly works well, it becomes almost invisible. It seems that many people only notice platforms when something goes wrong. The problem, of course, is that once things go wrong, the effects can be dramatic, and the tarnish on a site's image can linger for a long time. Witness the well-publicized eBay outages that shook loose almost $10 billion out of the company's stock market valuation. Since the low point last summer, the company's stock price has climbed slowly but has not yet reached preoutage heights.