Michael Gracie

I received a call yesterday asking if I would mind trying to buy some tickets to the World Series. Of course not. But as everyone now knows, the online ticket sales were a complete bust.

Received a call today requesting the same, and once again the servers simply bomb after just a few of the cute little “countdown” refreshes. Meanwhile, I get a chance to read this language at the bottom of the screen and wound up wondering why anyone would want to patronize major league baseball anyway:

The following are trademarks or service marks of Major League Baseball entities and may be used only with permission of Major League Baseball Properties, Inc. or the relevant Major League Baseball entity: Major League, Major League Baseball, MLB, the silhouetted batter logo, World Series, National League, American League, Division Series, League Championship Series, All-Star Game, and the names, nicknames, logos, uniform designs, color combinations, and slogans designating the Major League Baseball clubs and entities, and their respective mascots, events and exhibitions.

Besides being littered with everyday dictionary words, it sounds downright ominous…almost threatening. Is this organization going to bust you for wearing purple and black, or red and black, if they don’t get a license fee? Or maybe they’ll plant microphones throughout the stadium and charge you for breathing one of the terms above?

Of course, I caught that garbage before the server pushed a timout…

This is either a terrible dream, or the joke of the decade. Either way, it’s a world class failure.

UPDATE: I retract everything, since the fiasco is now being blamed on hackers. Good rule to follow - when your planning is piss poor, meaning you don’t provide enough bandwidth, load balancing, and server capacity to meet the needs of an easily expected mad rush, just blame some hackers. Maybe baseball should stake claim to the word “internet” and then use the licensing proceeds to engage a more suitable service provider.

A few parallels worth mentioning:

• The need for patience and persistence - Not everyone is going to buy into your idea the moment you deliver it. By the same token, neither is a trout. Be patient with people as well as finicky aquatica - adjust your presentation to achieve the intended objective. Quit too soon, and you might miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime.
• Betting on your winners - Throw your all into the stuff that’s working. Successful entrepreneurs get a boost from small successes, and by directing attention to the small wins they often turn them into big ones. Commodities traders are particularly good at this - they generally double up their bets on their winners (and yes, I consider traders entrepreneurs). For trout, go for your favorite flies and favorite holes first - the ones you have confidence in as a result of previous successes.
• Knowing when to cut your losses - You can turn a small business failure into a big one very easily. Just keep throwing good money after bad. You can turn stellar conditions into a “no fish” day as well - just stick to the same fly, or stand in the same hole. All day.

CNET recently published a list of the top 10 dot-com flops, and after reading through the list, I could only think the list was contributed to by the folks at Fucked Company. Simply put, nobody seemed to herald any part of the ideas, and I believed some of the companies actually had some merit.

Read through the list, and ponder these points:

- What is not hot right now could very well be hot a few years later - trends matter
- Business models are often remade for changing times, much the same as major motion pictures are
- Getting the word out is hardly ever a bad thing
- Technology breeds efficiencies, despite what your IT director says about that ERP implementation
- Being spendthrift almost always causes pain down the road

Big failures should lead to learning, or does the free flow of capital simply dumb people down? Certainly, all of CNET’s top ten suffered from one “ailment” - an awful lot of money.

Douglas Adams said “Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”

I wonder what the next list of flops will look like, and who will make the next billion off of someone else’s “failed” idea.

This revelation might just make the British think twice about pawning all the responsibility off on their ISPs.

Not a single spammer prosecuted is the word from merry ol’ England. Ridiculously low fines and a ton of loopholes are to blame.

Spamroll thinks the UK should call on the United Nations for help with their spam issues. Then they can blame yet someone else when nothing gets done.

A few weeks back Spamroll led your way to a test of your ability to identify phishing attempts. This test was sculpted around some UK products and services (so obviously it was designed for the British), but that didn’t matter all too much.

Almost everyone failed.
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